Instant Recovery from a Hard Drive Crash

Imagine this nightmare… you’re working on a large business report and with just a few more finishing touches to go, and you suffer a hard drive crash. Everything is gone and you have to explain to your client why you won’t have the report ready. Wouldn’t it be great to have near instantaneous recovery from this sort of disaster?

explosion over beach

With sufficient preparation you can recover and get back to work with either minimal or no loss of data. We need to change our view of our computers as a single point of failure / critical device to that of a simple appliance. If your coffee maker breaks, you might not be happy to have to replace it, but you can go out and buy a cup of coffee, get a new coffee maker and be back up and running very soon. By treating your computer as a replaceable and disposable device, it changes the way that you are able to work.

Separate your data from your computer

Right now you may have a bunch of documents and spreadsheets in a folder. Another folder has pictures and videos while your email has been downloading and getting stored on your computer for years. In previous posts I talked about moving your email to the cloud and I talked about the topic of cloud based files too.

Using Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive allows all of your critical files to be kept both on your computer and in the cloud. Going back to the earlier example, if your report is stored in Dropbox then every time you save the file it gets uploaded to Dropbox. With Google Docs, it is automatically saved every few minutes. If you are on a plane or somewhere that you don’t have internet access, sync services like Dropbox let you keep working normally and then will sync up once it has an internet connection.

Email if kept in Gmail or Outlook.com means that you don’t have a dependency on your computer. You can still have it download a copy that stays in sync with the online version.

With prices for online storage coming down, you can pay about $100 a year for 1 TB or more of storage. This can store most picture and document collections so that all of your precious memories are securely backed up online.

Making an Instant Recovery from a Crash

So now that you’ve got everything protected, what do you do when disaster strikes and your computer crash makes working impossible? The price of computers has come down substantially. Even a very basic laptop can be had for under $300. I have discovered an excellent source of high quality and powerful computers is the refurbished market. One example is Dell. Numerous companies lease computers for 3 or 4 years at a time. Once the lease is over, the computers go back to the manufacturer. In the case of Dell, they have an online store to sell these. Check with your country, in Canada it is dellrefurbished.ca. I have bought several laptops and desktops from Dell Refurbished and have been very pleased with the results. As an added bonus, they have sales several times a year so be sure to do an online search for “Dell Refurbished coupon code” to save up to 50%.

So where am I going with this? If you buy a refurbished computer, then you have a standby ready to go at a moment’s notice. If it’s a laptop, you can order it, set it up with what you need, such as Dropbox and your favourite software. Put it away and then you have it ready to go. As far as insurance goes, this is a good option, especially if your livelihood relies on having a working computer.

life insurance

With computers, it’s not a case of if it will fail but when. Having a strategy where you don’t have to think about protecting your files from a crash is the way to a fast recovery. We buy insurance for our lives, cars and our health, so with the same way of thinking, we can insure our data.

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Moving Your Email to the Cloud – Part 3

Once you have moved your email to a cloud based service such as Gmail or Outlook.com, your next step is moving your existing emails that you want accessible from this service.

Moving Your Email Messages

If you use Microsoft Outlook or another email program that uses IMAP for accessing email then it’s a relatively straightforward process. For this post, I will use Outlook as an example, but this can be done with nearly any email program that you might be using.

First, add your account to Outlook. This varies depending on the Outlook version and is generally File->Add Account or Tools–>Accounts and Settings.

Enter your account information including incoming mail server (IMAP). If you don’t plan to send email from Outlook, then you can leave out the SMTP settings.

After the account is added, you will see your current local email folders along with the ones in your cloud based email account. It’s now just a matter of dragging over emails and/or folders to your new email account.

Before doing any of this email movement, it is of critical importance to back up your local email. In Outlook, this means finding the PST file and making a copy. If you use another program, find out how to back up the email data and back it up. There’s nothing worse that discovering that messages you thought you dragged over actually got lost and went missing. I’ve seen this happen, so don’t be disappointed – make a copy first!

Moving Your Contacts

If you have 1000 email contacts in Outlook then you will likely want to keep these in your move to a cloud based service. The first step is getting your contacts out of Outlook. Go to your contacts. Similar to adding an account, Go to File->Open and Export. Choose Import/Export and choose Export to a File. Then choose Comma Separated Values.

Confirm the contacts folder and then select the file name to save. You can choose Map Custom Fields to make some adjustments in the data that is exported if you want. Depending on the email service, you should be able to import this contacts file.

After Moving Your Email

Congratulations! You’ve now gotten all of your email and contacts moved to a safe and secure cloud based email service. No longer do you rely on one computer for checking on archived email messages or for sending email. If something happens to your computer, you will not lose any email as it’s not stored there anymore. In future posts, we will talk about how to protect this even further by backing up your online email to another source.  Which email service do you use? Are you satisfied with it or is there something you wish worked better? Let me know in the comments.

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Moving Your Email to the Cloud – Part 2

In the previous post, we talked about why you want to consider moving your email to a cloud based service. This is especially beneficial if you are currently downloading all of your email to your computer using a program like Outlook or Windows Live Mail. Another consideration is that you are using your internet provider’s email service. An example would be an address like neil@rogers.com (Rogers Internet) or neil@verizon.com (Verizon Internet).  If you leave your internet provider then you will also lose your email address. Today we will go over how to pick an email service.

Long Term Availability of an Email Provider

The first criteria to consider is the longevity of the company providing the email service. If you read about some new email provider who promises 50 GB of space for all users for free, be wary. The cost of providing free services might mean that the provider is unable to continue running after a short period of time. Nothing is guaranteed but a large company such as Google or Microsoft is likely to be around for awhile.



Ease of Use

This is a more subjective criteria but if you are a relative newcomer to computers or want simplicity then a set of 1000 features isn’t going to entice you to sign up! The good thing about free services is that you can sign up, try it out and then cancel if you don’t like it.

Feature Set

There are certain features that set different services apart. Below are some examples that might help you narrow down between the most popular email services:

Outlook.com

This is run by Microsoft and has a lot of the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook that many people have been running on their computers for a long time. If you are an Outlook user, an Outlook.com email account can be easily integrated with Microsoft Outlook on your computer. This gives you the best of both worlds – from any computer your can reach your email, calendar and contacts and they will all appear when you are on your computer using Microsoft Outlook. Other services such as Gmail don’t integrate as well with Outlook. You can of course get your email from Gmail with Outlook on your computer but not contacts and calendar (except for certain paid premium versions)

 

Gmail

Gmail has been around for a long time and is run by Google, one of the largest companies in the world. A Gmail account is often used as a login to many popular websites. If you already use lots of Google services then you likely have a Gmail account that is used for logging in.

 

Yahoo!

Yahoo was recently purchased by Verizon but it is reasonable to expect that the Yahoo mail service will continue. There are many millions of people who use Yahoo, so this is a good example of a service that is in transition but has thus far continued to exist.

Apple iCloud Mail

If you use an Apple device such as an iPhone, Apple mail and the corresponding iCloud service is an appealing choice. The web based email look much like it does on an iPhone and you can even get free Windows software from Apple that allows you to use Microsoft Outlook with Apple iCloud Mail.

Making a choice for cloud based email

There’s no one size fits all. Learn about the different email service by going to Google and do searches such as “free online email service reviews”. Read comments about the pros and cons of different services and then try them out. It’s important to be comfortable with your choice before you give out your new email address to your friends and family.

If you don’t care about the email left behind on your computer then you can just start using your new email address! If you have email to move over or contacts, keep reading into the next post where we will talk about getting the virtual ‘moving truck’ to take your data to the cloud.

 

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Moving Your Email to the Cloud – Part 1

Let’s start with a quick poll: what email program do you use? Or is your email in the cloud?

What email program do you use

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There are two primary ways to store your email:

  1. On your computer in a program such as Microsoft Outlook
  2. In the cloud in a service such as Gmail, Yahoo! or Outlook.com

If you are already using a cloud based service then you’re done, you can stop reading! I will have posts that talk about making the best use of these cloud services and how to protect your email messages in these locations.

email to cloud

Why move email to the cloud?

If you have been storing years of email on your computer then you may want to consider moving to a cloud based service. Why would you want to do this?

  • You keep online receipts and financial correspondence in your email – imagine the headaches if all of this was lost due to a failed hard drive.
  • if the information is only on your computer then it’s only accessible when you’re home. Wouldn’t it be great to access all of your email history from anywhere?

For many years I kept all of my old emails in Microsoft Outlook on my home computer. I switched to Gmail so all of my new messages were easily accessible on my phone but old ones only at home. Since moving all of my emails online, there have been many occasions when I’m out that I need to find some old piece of information and have quickly found it right from my phone.

That’s great but I really like Outlook/Apple Mail/Thunderbird…

For several years I recommended to my cousin who has thousands of emails in Outlook PST files that he should move everything to a cloud based service. He much prefers Outlook over any of the cloud based services that he tried. I informed him that he can have the best of both worlds. With relative ease, you can still use your email program of your choice and connect it to your preferred cloud based service. The great thing about this is that when you are at home and filing or deleting emails, all the changes are simultaneously happening in the cloud based email too. You can work with whichever you want – the email program on the computer or the cloud based service.

Ok, you’ve convinced me, but how to I move my emails

Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Before transferring over your years of emails, you first need to decide which cloud based service to use. I will first tell you what not to use – your Internet provider’s email.

What do I mean by this? A popular provider in my area is Rogers. When signing up, many people have email addresses in the form of yourname@rogers.com. Rogers has a partnership with Yahoo! so you get a Yahoo! account branded by Rogers. In theory you could move all of your email here, but I highly recommend against it:

If you cancel or change your Internet provider, you will lose your email account that you have with them!

Years ago, the only way to get an email address was with your Internet provider. This is no longer the case. You can register your own domain (I did that years ago, more in a future post) or use a previously mentioned service like Outlook.com, Yahoo! or Gmail. If you are choosing to move your computer based email to an online cloud service, I highly recommend signing up for a free account with one of these email based cloud services. There are numerous advantages:

  • assuming these companies stay in business, your email is for life
  • they are free, and most have a paid service that gives you features like extra space or no advertising
  • you can still use your Internet service provider email address with most of these services – more about that in another post in this series

In the next post, I will go over choosing from the online email providers and then talk about how to get your email moved online.

 

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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.

Click here to join our mailing list and learn lots more about how to Protect Your All!

What type of digital data are you most concerned about protecting?

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