As we rely more heavily on technology, there are a few things that we can do so when it fails us, we don’t lose our entire lives with it.
1. Backup everything, twice. It doesn’t help to have a backup of all of your photos, documents, and music if your backup is only located in one place. Always have a backup of your backup in case your backup goes out. Oh and make sure it’s not connected to your computer. Store it somewhere that you can easily grab it if your house catches fire, etc.
2. The recent BlackBerry fiasco has brought email and SMS outages to the forefront. What would happen if your email went down and you weren’t able to email your boss or friends? My advice is to have a second known email that you can access all of your important contacts (have it listed in your signature on your emails as a secondary email) via, so if your email ever is down, you have another way to send and receive.
3. My husband is pretty old school. He still has a black book with all of his contacts in it. Every time he takes it out to look up a number from an old friend it makes me laugh. Until the day he went to the cell phone store and came back with a phone that had been wiped clean on accident by a “genius”. (he never backed it up, really?) He was ready to shoot the guy. If not for his little black book he would have been a pain in the butt getting all of his contacts back. So when in doubt, go old school and write important stuff down or at least have all of your contacts on your computer! (and back it up!)
4. Memorize at least two important phone numbers. This will come in handy if you are ever lost or stranded and your cell phone battery is dead, or if you lost it. What would happen if you tried to call someone to tell them you needed help, but didn’t know anyone’s number?
5. Keep a land line phone. How ancient, right? But really, what happens if there is a storm or disaster and cell towers do not work? You can even go an extra step and make it a corded rotary landline phone (do those even exist anymore?!)
What other things can help you when dealing with technology? Leave your thoughts and comments below!
My backup strategy!
1. Partition my drive into 2 drives, 1 for the OS and all the programs. The other for all my data, on which I put “My Documents” folder.
2. All Data w/o exception is stored in My Documents in the DATA Partition.
3. The My Documents gets backed up daily or weekly to an external drive on a regular basis.
4. At the same time all my data is backed up to an Online (Internet) drive whenever the computer is idle. I use Carbonite as it keeps multiple copies of each file as they are changed.
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