Safeguarding Your Data – Part 1

Most of us, if not all, are guilty of not taking care of our most precious possessions as well as we could. I’m not sure what the reasons are for this but I prefer to think it is due more to our optimistic outlook rather than laziness.  The truth, for those of you who can handle it, is that your trusty technical gizmo is destined to fail. How this failure affects you will depend on how well you have prepared for it and in this article I will make some suggestions on how you can lessen the pain when it occurs.

Plan To Fail - Not fail To Plan

Approach the problem of securing your information in a step by step approach.
Step 1 . Make a list of all information you currently have stored on any computer device you own. This should include external usb drives, portable hard drives, and cd’s you may have created.
This is easier said than done as most people now have valuable information stored across multiple devices.
Step 2. Rate the importance of this information to you. Most people will put photos at the top of this list but don’t forget your personal documents and email.
Step 3. Use the two location rule.
Mark the items where you have the information stored on multiple devices. For example if you’ve made copies of your photos to an external hard drive.
Step 4. Make a schedule to secure the information for which there is no backup.

Common Mistakes In Securing Data
Online Email: One of the most common areas where I see massive data loss are online email accounts such as hotmail and google. I’ve seen countless examples of people losing all their email because their email account has been hacked. If you must use online email, I don’t personally recommend it, then you need to be aware that in the event of a hack attack you will lose all mail you have stored on there. My personal recommendation is to get yourself a proper email account and store your email on your computer. At a minimum if you have an online account periodically forward your important emails to another email account preferably with a different provider.
 Next month I will expand further on this article.