Back up your stuff!

This week’s tip is inspired by the fact that I’m going on vacation for a week, starting tomorrow. I’ll be bringing my computer along, but I don’t intend to do work while I’m away (I’m mostly bringing the computer so that my kids will be able to watch videos and listen to music during our airplane ride).

My computer is my life. Not only is all my client work contained in these fragile-looking pieces of plastic and metal, but all my family pictures and videos, financial records, correspondence, and pretty much everything else.

This image shows the actual parts of a real hard drive, completely taken apart. Doesn’t look like much, does it?? If my computer gets dropped, crushed, splashed, shocked, or mad at me on this trip, my whole life is hosed because these little doohickeys won’t work.

Which is why I have a backup plan. I have an external hard drive that I use for backing up, with the help of a great (Mac-only) program called Synk. But actually that hard drive has been acting a little weird lately, so it’s been, um, awhile since I’ve done a full backup. Not good!

So for this trip specifically, I’m doing a complete backup of my computer onto my husband’s computer (which he’s not bringing on the vacation). It’s actually running in the background as I’m typing this blog entry.

This week’s heart of the matter: Back up your stuff! My impending trip brought into focus the fact that I really needed to get serious about backing up — not just huge backups every few months, but a weekly or daily routine. Everyone with a computer should have some form of backup. You can buy software to automate this, or have a tech expert set up your computer to do it for you, but even if you can’t or don’t know how to do these things, you can do something right now. Pick one of these FREE actions and commit to doing it within 24 hours:

• Burn your important documents onto a CD (or several CDs)
• Upload your favorite digital photos onto a web-based service like Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa
• Set up a gmail account and email yourself copies of your most important financial records
• Set up a Box.net account (yes, you can pay for more storage, but the “Lite” version is still free) and upload those financial records and important files

Until next week!

Related posts:

1. How to upgrade anything, part 2 of 6 (Heart-Centered Technology Tip)
2. Let technology do the heavy lifting!