I Curse Technology

Now, for those of you who know me well, that might come as a bit of a surprise. After all, my entire working life has dealt with selling computers and/or software.  Trust me, there were plenty of days that left me cursing about all that! But computers are just a tool, and a not so reliable tool at times. I was reminded of that this morning when a friend told me she had her laptop in the shop last week. Due to complications she ended up buying a new one, they moved all her data (not copied) to a brand new laptop, and then the new laptop wouldn’t work. You can bet that she was cursing a bit.

I know what you are thinking. Backup! Yes, that is what I was thinking, too. All of us understand we need to do it, and yet we put it off. I used to be very lazy about backups, but after my third hard drive crash, with nothing recoverable at the end, I changed my tune.  So here is your lecture about backing up your data. “Do it. No excuses.”

Here are some options you should look into, whether you are a business owner or an individual with just a home computer.

• Flash drives – each Sunday look at all the flyers and see how cheap they are. You can buy them at WalMart or Walgreens or Best Buy. Copy your documents and your pictures to them.
• External Hard Drive- I now have two external drives. They store another copy of all my documents and pictures, as well as all the backups of my email and folders. Now that my laptop is running low on disk space, I am running some of my software off of one of these external drives. A nice external drive will be anywhere from under $100 to $300.
• Carbonite – this is an offsite backup company that backs up all the files on your computer and stores them for you. I pay a low yearly fee for this (about $80). The software quietly sits on my computer, and as I add or update files, Carbonite quickly makes a copy of it. It does this all without me having to remember. There are other companies like Carbonite. They just happen to be the one I use.
  

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If I should lose a file from my computer, or the whole computer dies, I am satisfied knowing that all my data is in several places. You just can’t be too careful.

A good rule of thumb is to backup your email no less frequently than once a week. I do this at the end of the day when I am leaving my desk. It takes a little while because I keep so many emails. (maybe an hour) I’d be in trouble if I lost my emails!  I store this backup on my external hard drives. If I wanted to, I could put a copy on my laptop and it would get backed up to Carbonite.

One other thing I do is keep track of all the software programs I have added to my system in case I have to rebuild it. You can create a folder called “Downloads” and store all the software you have downloaded and installed. Back this up to the external drive, as well. You still have the CD’s for the “box” software you purchased, so you don’t need to back that up.

All of these things let me sleep a little better at night. My plan is to be prepared for anything to happen. My next step is buying another computer and just having this little ol’ laptop as backup for those just in case times. You’ll be reading about that…

Do you have any other suggestions for backup?