bizSanDiego the business of san diego county

Back It Up posted on November 30, -0001

I HAD ALMOST FINISHED WRITING APRIL’S Editor’s Note a few weeks back. As I thought about how to put the exclamation point on the article, I had one of those TGIF moments. A few more strokes on the keyboard, and my workweek would be just about complete. I did have a few hours of organizing, research and editing planned for the weekend, but, for the most part, I was looking forward to spending some quality time with my wife and kids.

Oftentimes in this business—as entrepreneurs, executives and business owners can relate to—weekends aren’t always as free as they should be. The line between the workweek and weekend is blurred. But this particular weekend, unbeknownst to me, I was going to have the most available free time I’d had in months.

At about 4:30 that afternoon, my computer froze. My first thought: Oh no, I haven’t saved my Editor’s Note. While that was true, it ended up being the least of my worries. I tried doing a force quit. No luck. So I did a manual shutdown. No big deal, right? Done that hundreds of times. But after the computer rebooted: nada, nothing, zip, zilch. Just a silver screen.

The following Monday, I took my laptop to the Apple store, just to find out it was a hard drive crash. The Apple support guy followed up the bad news by chiming in that the computer could be farmed out to a data recovery expert for a mere $1,700. No guarantee, either. My heart sunk and I left the store bummed out, to say the least.

Luckily, Justin Wilson, who does tech support for bizSanDiego, had some data recovery software and swooped down, Superman style, to save the day. I sent him my laptop and he was able to recover all my files, except for my original April Editor’s Note. No big deal, though, because the crash obviously spawned an entirely new letter.

Think this story’s over? Nope, it’s just ready to begin.
A 2005 U.S. consumer survey of computer users, sponsored by Maxtor Corp. (since acquired by Seagate Technology in Scotts Valley, Calif.), indicated that many Americans are flirting with digital disaster when it comes to a failure to back up their files. The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive, found that more than a third of U.S. adults who have personal and/or professional data and digital information stored on a PC or laptop never back up their files, and more than two-thirds of those who do back up their files don’t do it often enough. Don’t say, “It’ll never happen to me.” I said it, and look what happened.

On a corporate level, we’re not always lucky enough to have SuperJustin the tech guru on our side, and a crash can potentially wipe out months, years, even decades of valuable info. And on a personal level, a crash is capable of wiping out all your family photos, prized digital music collection, poetry anthology, plans for the world’s next great invention, whatever. Don’t be the next victim. Back it up, back it up, back it up. Need I say more?

Jon Hindman
EDITOR