2010 New Years' Resolution

This really happened to me.

My home office PC had an automated backup program running that saved my data to a USB connected external hard drive.  I figured everything was A-OK and there was nothing to worry about.  In truth, I hadn't been careful enoough in selecting software that reported via email/popup/siren/flashinglights when something went wrong.

The external drive failed and I didn't notice.  A couple of months later the local electrical utility company was doing some work about 2 miles from me.  A truck backed into a pole holding a transformer... knocking out power in the area... and breaking my main hard drive in my PC.  The one I thought was safely copying data to the external drive.

Emails, bookmarks, software, data, music files, photos, work, play, family tree data, contracts, etc, etc -- all gone.

Oops!

$1,500 later I had my data recovered to a new boot drive.

I also learned two things:

1. Be careful about selecting my backup software
2. Check to make sure it is running

A couple of months later I read about an online backup solution.  Secure, automatic, remote, reliable, simple to set up and affordable.  In fact, you can back up 2 GB of data at no cost if you want to try it out.  When you need your data it is right there on the Internet.  You can even restore using just a browser!

All of my valuable emails, pictures, scanned images & documents, genealogy databases and reports were gone... without warning.  And it cost me a bundle of $ and some frayed nerves before I got lucky enoough to get them recovered.  I don't want to do it again.

For 2010... promise yourself to visit http://nolimitsuccess.info/mozy.html and when you forget about making backups you can sleep peacefully knowing your computer is looking after things for you. It will be a resolution that is easy to keep!


Happy New Year!

P.S. Did I ever tell you the one about the stolen laptop?  I'll save that for next year!