Taking steps to ensure you don’t lose anything valuable
You’re sitting right in front of it right now. You may call it your PC or home computer, but in fact it’s your filing system and it may be worth a fortune!
What do you use it for?
Probably everything from playing games, solving the crossword, personal banking, correspondence, financial records and maybe your three-quarter written memoirs which you plan on publishing in 3 years time. In addition you may have a host of info on your bank accounts, stocks and shares, savings accounts, insurance plans, pensions, Premium Bond numbers, even records for your bills and payday loans.
Sentimental photos
And what about all the family pictures you’ve been taking since you bought that digital camera? Not to mention your collection of downloaded music and videos. I have a huge collection of art shows of the old masters and impressionists.
All it takes is a micro-second
If you are like me, you never switch the computer off except when it complains that it’s going into overload. But at the first rumble of thunder on the horizon I do a quick save and then exit from every program that’s open, switch off and pull the plug out of the back of the computer.
More than lightning
Apart from lightning which zaps your computer and destroys the hard disk in a microsecond, a simple computer crash or more serious hazards such as fire, flood and burglary could put you out of business in seconds.
The price of the computer itself is the least of my worries
A computer or laptop for home use costs less than $1,000 these days, but the information contained on it could be worth a fortune and cost you plenty to replace. Photos and other items of sentimental value can never be replaced. And of course, if you have scanned things like medical data, share certificates and insurance policy documents onto your hard disk, it’s bye-bye forever.
You keep your computer insured with your household contents insurance, but the contents of the computer? It’s time to arrange a little back-up.
It’s easy
It’s easy these days. You can simply copy ‘my documents’ and ‘my pictures’ onto a flash memory drive and you’re all backed up.
There are also web-based back-up services for which you pay a small fee depending on how much disk space you use.
Thieves!
Protect yourself against thieves. By backing up your data you now offer thieves two tempting targets, the computer and the back-up flash drive memory unit. They could use the data for crooked purposes such as making a fraudulent credit application in your name or even blackmail.
And if you have stored your online passwords somewhere on your computer or back-up disk, they could help themselves to the contents of your bank account. So you should also be very careful about the personal or financial data you actually keep on your computer.
Back to paper
I keep a small notebook in which I record all my passwords and other computer related data. I also have the policy numbers and contact details for my bank account, investment, pension plan and insurance policy, plus my tax reference number, my accountant’s and solicitor’s phone numbers in a separate box file on a shelf in my study.
It’s worth taking an hour or two to back up your life – if something goes wrong, it could take days, weeks or even months to reassemble everything.
You really can’t afford not to. A friend of mine had a computer crash right before finals…and it had her term paper on it. Luckily she had saved it on a thumb drive, but if she hadn’t, then all the research she did, all that work would have been gone, and professors do not accept excuses.
A very, very good reminder. A good friend of mine recently encountered a problem like that. Her computer had crashed and she lost everything. Old pictures of her baby, documents, I mean, it was pretty bad. So yes, back up your work people!