By the time we press “send” on this, January will be nearly over.
Happy New Year, anyway!
And the new year greeted us with some of the same old problems we’re used to seeing.
We know this first one is an “old problem” as we’re reprinting the next three paragraphs from our January 2010 column….
Outside of the “computer room,” data backup continues to be an issue, especially for that remote laptop, or the PC on a network, but storing data locally.
USB flash and portable hard drives are good for that kind of smaller backup; but it’s a mostly manual process that requires developing the “backup habit”.
If you have a PC with access to network storage, consider saving your data there (where there’s already a good automatic backup regimen in place, right?). No network? Consider an on-line service, like Carbonite, or CDS’ own “Basic Backup”.
We’ve had two clients with possible data loss already this year.
One required expensive (but successful) recovery services. It may be a little late for a New Year’s resolution, but a good one would be “backup, backup, backup”.
And not only to protect data from accidental erasure or equipment malfunction. Sometimes, in the aftermath of a data-encrypting ransomware attack, the only recovery is from a backup.
