The Little Investment that will Save You BIG!
Years ago when I worked at the BYU computer help desk, I got a frantic call from a graduate student. He had put months of work into his Thesis for a Master’s Degree. His desperate phone call was something like this “Hey I’ve got this really big, really important document and something went wrong and I can’t access it now, can you help me get it back?” I asked “What happened?” He said “I don’t know but when I go to open it the program says Cannot Open Corrupted file!” My second question to him was “Do you have a backup?” There was a long uneasy pause; “uh…. No”. I felt a pit in my stomach knowing the chance of recovering the file was slight, and I could only imagine his anxiety after months of work apparently vanishing into thin air. After he brought in his PC with a few tools and a lot of work we were able to recover the text of the document but all the formatting was lost. He basically had to go back in and put in all the paragraphs, punctuation, tables, margins, etc. It took him hours but he was grateful the words were mostly still there. He was lucky.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had friends or associates lose valuable information on their computer. It’s happened to me for various reasons, the hard drive crashes, the power goes out, or the computer just goes bezerk and important information is gone. If you’ve experienced such frustration and know computers can be extremely useful tools or exasperating pieces of junk and they can be either within hours of each other you probably know a couple important rules for computers:
The cardinal rules for working on computers are:
These Rules help offset the fundamental computer laws:
Most of us save family photos, personal contacts, financial information, and important information on our computers that could be at least troublesome and at worst devastating if we were to lose it. I get real nervous when someone tells me they have all their important family photo’s on their computer and when I ask if it’s backed up they say – “no, I need to get to that”. Here’s an important safety tip – “BACKUP NOW!”
Personally, I have 3 backups of my digital family photo’s and important documents. The originals are on my computer, my first backup is on an external hard drive. The second is on another external hard drive that I keep at work, and the third is a DVD that I burn every six months that I keep at work. About every six months I have to spend an hour or two sorting and then backing up all my photos to each location, but I know if my hard drive crashes, if my house burns down, if a meteor hits the south end of the valley, I could still have my family photos and copy of my financial records.
Another Alternative to keeping your photos and important data on external hard drives it to back it up to the web. There are a number of websites that will for free or a fee, keep backups of your data. These are great if you trust that you’ll always be able to get to them. I like my data in my own hot little hands, but there are lots of options and you can choose whatever you’re comfortable with, but the important thing is: BACKUP OFTEN! The price you pay to recover, or the price you pay to lose important files is exponential compared to the time, effort, and price you pay to backup earlier.
At ProTechtus, one of our goals is to help protect you online and that includes your
important personal data. If you need help, or if you’ve never backed up your irreplaceable photos, give us a call. We offer a very affordable service to help you keep your priceless documents and photo’s safe. We’d like to be your trusted computer help to provide any level of assistance you may need.
Below are some free helpful instructions to do your own quick backups and links to sites that can assist you in saving your important personal information. If you need any help at all, please give us a call.