by Dave Hartsock in Daves Computer Tips
Airline pilots, IT managers, talk show hosts, doctors, football players, and sky divers all have something important in common. What might that be? They all have a plan “B” or a “crash” plan to use when things go wrong – and they always do at the most inopportune time. This is one reason why the unofficial Daves Computer Tips motto is “You can never have enough backups”!
What’s your Crashplan?
So what is your plan “B”? Have you given any thought to absolute recovery of your important documents, pictures, and files in case disaster strikes? Disasters come in big and small and we often forget the “big” or rationalize that it won’t happen to us. We’re probably right, but natural disasters and theft do happen. How long would it take to download your music collection? What if the government asked to see your tax information from several years ago? How would you replace the pictures of vacations past or long lost relatives? Let’s not forget financial or business records.
Six months ago I decided to seriously re-evaluate my personal plan “B”. Times and technology have changed and a re-evaluation allowed me to look at newer technologies and consider my current methodology. In years past I had created images of each individual computer to external hard drives and copied individual documents, music, pics, and files to the same drives and kept one off-site – away from my home. Obviously a labor intensive ritual, but “You can never have enough backups”. Since the introduction of Windows Home Server I have relied heavily on its automatic backup technology and manually updating images and files on external hard drives became less frequent, maybe even forgotten on occasion (don’t tell anyone I’m human). This has left me susceptible to situations involving theft and natural disaster (I can’t be home sitting on the couch with a shotgun all the time! ~ grin).
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This excerpt is shared with permission from davescomputertips.com.
