Get your data off site. Sometimes bad things happen in
threes, and then it’s really bad. We’ve had three business associates
tell us their offices burned down during the last three years. If your
office burns down, you don’t want your computer and your backups to
be five feet from each other. Give
a copy to your neighbor, take one home from the office, mail one to your
mom, or use one of the online services.
Test your backup.
We get one call a year from someone who hired a consultant to install his
or her NoteSmith CD. One consultant was unaware of the company’s backup
routine, so he did nothing to include NoteSmith in it. A different
consultant set up the backup routine long before the latest programs were
added. NoteSmith periodically backs itself up but the user never
grabs a diskette to get it off site because they know that someone else
automates a full backup in their office. You know what happens next.
Forget the fireproof safe.
Such things were invented to save paper. When they get hot, they emit
water vapor to keep the paper inside from reaching flash point. A safe
is not safe for electronic backups, which can be harmed easily from either
water vapor or heat.
CDs do not last forever.
The CDs that you make yourself (called “burning” but this isn’t the
appropriate time to use that jargon) have about a 5-year shelf life.
The silver program CDs that come from Microsoft will probably last a
generation. The blue-green
home use versions made with a laser will fail eventually, quicker in hot
and humid sections of the country like Texas and Florida. Ditto for Zip
Disks and diskettes, which can be subject
to earlier failure.
Create
a “MyData” folder on your computer and have all your
programs store their data in that folder. Then you only have one folder,
albeit large, to back up. There is no need to back up the operating system
or your programs because you have those installation disks available. Your
data: Priceless. For every other program disk, there’s MasterCard.
Digitize your paper. We all have important, original
papers. Consider scanning
them and saving the digital image. The paperless
office is unlikely in the near future, but think paper-less (meaning less
paper). Do your part to store electronically any paper that you receive.
The UK is doing so with medical records and will save over a billion cubic
feet of storage space. Modern scanners will save your images as
compressed, ubiquitous PDF files that can be viewed with a free Adobe
Acrobat Reader.
Copy them to CDs to make them portable, then simply
recopy them once every five years or so to get a fresh yet
identical image. PDF may be the most popular format at the moment and is
likely to remain that way for many years. TIF and JPG are other compressed
formats that are likely to be usable far into the future. Do what you can
to avoid creating paper in the first place. Email and fax-to-email
services go a long way towards saving trees. JM
