Friday, March 23, 2012

Backing Up ~ Priceless!



Technology ~ Blessing or Curse
Backing Up ~ Priceless!

How wonderful to be living in this period of time in history with all the marvelous and delightful technology that we experience on a daily basis.  Take the computer, for instance, it causes us to fluctuate from an array of emotions from delight and appreciation as we accomplish a myriad of tasks that we undertake on a daily basis to feeling overwhelmed and exasperated as we attempt to take authority over this powerhouse machine that seems, at times to have acquired its own will and mind.

Concurrently, we store monumental amounts of information which amounts to a substantial deposit of our lives on this comparatively small piece of incredible machinery.  
I cringe to think what would happen if suddenly we were unable to access this information locked deeply inside this amazing marvel.  Not to mention all of our treasures amounting to endless hours of research of family history, personal data, photos and so the list goes on....
What if an important document or file gets altered before verification or worse yet, it ‘disappears’.  Yes, I think we all unfortunately have  had the experience of displeasure or panic at the realization of what happened at the flick of a wrong key entry.  
I had a taste of this last night as I was ‘tweeking’ a website that I have been working on.  Funny, how quickly we become microscopic and extremely focused on the most minute details, temporarily becoming this 'technologically introspective stranger' as we venture to complete our most challenging undertaking.  Yet within a second of the wrong keystroke... it all vanishes, hours and hours of labor intensive work... gone.
I was quickly reminded of many times in past years of the importance of backing up everything we execute on the computer. 
Yes, despite this, I have somehow become a bit inattentive to heeding what I know should be top priority and not have allowed myself the luxury of letting that task fly under the radar due to endless reasons. I find myself now in the midst of hours upon hours of restructuring and repair as a result, brought on by myself.  
Needless, to say at this point I have ‘scheduled’ my computer backups on my Calendar for twice per month routinely.  In addition, as a rule, I think it may be wise to back up any scans of photographs or any new data that would be difficult to replace as it transpires.
 No matter how monotonous and repetitive an operation may seem, it must be done... no matter what, or relish in the consequences.

As I am now finishing the last ‘tweeks’ of my attempts to replicate my site,  I guess I should find my external hard drive and back up my work, after I..... 

4 comments:

  1. Such a good point. I back up my files to two hard drives and rotate them out. I've even decided to keep one of my back-ups at work...just in case something happens to my house!

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    1. Heather, That’s a great idea. I am also planning on copying our family photos onto CD’s and making several copies to give out to our grown kids and relatives. If anything should happen there are many copies spread out geographically.

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  2. Technology can bring forth some of my biggest fears... Once I loaded a new program that that completely crashed my computer. I have been scarred ever since! My first attempt at connecting my genealogy programs through dropbox caused me to loose all of my data (user error of coarse - not dropbox). Luckily I had backed up on a jumpdrive. Whew!
    Regards,
    Theresa (Tangled Trees)

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    1. Oh my... I feel your pain. These days we use a computer for almost every area of our lives and the thought of not having access to all that data can be alarming. That is good to know, though, I have not heard of that happening. It is always a good idea to backup your information and you were wise to do that right before. In addition to dropbox, I know several who use box.com, which works well, too.

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