Last week - 'Hi Carla, errrr my Mac is going really slow and I can't open 'photos' anymore, it just shows the spinning wheel for hours on end. I'm really worried that I've lost all my wedding and baby photos.'
Last month - 'OMG Carla - someone stole my laptop, iPad and phone (they were all in the same bag) what if someone deletes my 50K photos and videos?'
It goes on and on. I answer, as politely as possible, - do you back up? And they always say..... no, or I'm not sure, or sometimes, I use a cloud - isn't that enough?
BACK UP YOUR STUFF. There are so many reasons. But here are just a few:
Most memories aren't from the past year, they are years old. All that stuff from your digital cameras before your phone became your sole camera? Old letters, cv's, important documents, scans and oh so much music
..... Maybe it's on data cards stashed in a drawer? Maybe on some old hard drive somewhere but you can't quite remember where and it might be corrupt? The old stuff is the most precious. And now that we don't bother to print pics and stick them in albums, if you lose those data cards, you lose everything.
Clouds are great, I use them, we all should. However, I don't fancy paying every month for the rest of my life to store my 450 penguin videos from my Antarctica trip in 2012. I store my older stuff on an accessible home cloud so that they are still easy to access from my laptop or phone if I get the desire to check out some penguin action, but without getting sucked into too many monthly subscriptions which are only going to increase in cost over time.
Clouds are surprisingly easy to delete from. Your kid can do it. Give them your phone to shut them up for half an hour, and they could quite easily delete all your photos.... not just from the phone, but from the cloud. You can go search for them elsewhere, but once gone from the cloud - they are gone forever. I gave my old phone to a friends teenage daughter and told her to wipe it, safe in the knowledge that my photos and contacts were in the cloud. She accidentally deleted them all from the cloud. The good news is that I always have another backup system otherwise 2 years worth of pics were gone forever.
Recovery. We make mistakes.... quite often. Emails containing viruses are accidentally opened and important files are accidentally deleted. But this isn't a problem if you back your system up. It's so easy today, it happens in the background, you don't have to do a thing. Then, you simply restore to your system before the virus happened or the file was deleted.
It's easy to back up, you can buy a simple portable hard drive, set yourself a reminder to plug it in once a month and back up your entire system. Macs have Time Machine and Windows has 'backup and restore' and 'File History' but it's worth investing in a separate hard drive just in case your whole system gets corrupted.
I'm a fan of the WD range of products. I use MyCLoud home as a dropbox type storage tool, but it's a one-off cost. Their 'WD passports' are great little storage devices too. Around 100 EUR for 2 Terabytes of space which is HUGE. You literally just plug them in and off they go saving all your files.
Or just use an extra cloud. I use iCloud AND Dropbox, but there are tons of other great cloud solutions. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Take a few hours one weekend, and set up a regular automated backup. Because your stuff is worth it đAlternatively, give Webb Consulting a call and we'll do it for you. #webbconsulting #backupyourstuff #webbmonaco
