Why I’m so passionate about backup and protection of all

Every journey has a story about its origins and mine is no different. My start to protecting all and backup began in December 1991. I was looking through the software section at K-Mart and was digging through the piles of floppy disks that were being sold as Shareware. In today’s language, I was checking out some free apps before buying one! I came across a program called Family Tree Journal that let you create a family tree on your computer and could print it out. I bought the disk and installed it at home. This led me down a path of genealogy research that has continued to this day.

K-Mart

Floppy Disks

That genealogy software led me to many conversations with family members that included video and written interviews, copies of important documents and lots of pictures. I knew early on that it would be critical to have backup copies and to protect all of this irreplaceable information. At that time, this meant carefully organizing copies and originals in binders and cabinets. As time went on, I created a digitized system for storing all this information plus ways to access the data.

Now imagine that having all this information gathered over many years and losing all of it due to a failed hard drive or a virus. Thankfully, this has not happened. By having numerous levels of backups there is a safety net in place if a file is accidentally erased or a hard drive dies.

If only my 1991 self could see the options there are today for digitizing your life and the wealth of options the Internet has given us for accessing data through cloud based services.

Are your digital photos protected outside of your computer? Have you backed up all of your important financial documents that you’ll need for tax season? Are you overwhelmed at the thought of even tackling backup? Don’t panic, as I will guide your through what you can do to protect your all.

Don't Panic - backup your life

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Welcome to Protect My All – backup your life!

We all have so many things that are important to us to be backed up in the digital world – our documents, family photos and videos. How many times have you heard about someone losing years of precious memories when a virus wiped out their photos or a hard drive crashed – and they had no backup. With proper planning and the right tools, these disasters can be eliminated. The goal of Protect My All is best summed up with the old but true cliché – an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

So many times friends and clients call asking me to help with recovering lost data from either a damaged hard drive or a virus. So often is the case – no backup was completed in either a long time or ever. I remember when a friend called in a panic. She thought she had a virus and she could not open any of her pictures. It turned out that she had a ransomware virus and all pictures were gone unless she paid a huge ransom. Backup was set up but had failed and she was not notified. Some pictures were recovered but many were not.

How about the client who had email downloading to different devices? Over time, messages were only getting saved to one computer or one phone. An effective centrally stored email service prevents this from happening. I’ll have a lot more to say on this subject.

We are fortunate to live in a world with relatively inexpensive, high speed Internet. We all have important digital data in our home, how about backup of these pictures, videos and documents to the cloud – or even to our family members? There are many options to “protect your all” outside of the four walls of your house.

An overriding principle of protecting all your data is LOCKSS. This stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”. I’ll get into this in a another post, but the point is – the more backup copies you have, the better chance you have of protecting your data.

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