Does Your Backup Have A Backup?

It's official. My external hard drive has died. One of the pins inside the drive where the cord connects has broken and I no longer have access to over 500 GB of information. Luckily, I keep all of my important things on my computer and I have a Mediafire account where I keep some of my ebooks and music stored. You can bet I'll be expanding that selection pretty quickly.

I wasn't really in favour of the concept of "cloud" storage before, but I'm warming to the idea. Google has the new Google Drive, where it will create a folder on your computer and anything you put in the folder will automatically sync with your Google account. You get 5 GB for free, I guess you have to pay for more than that. But I have 4 Google accounts (don't ask) and my MIL and my husband won't be using their storage on their accounts, so I'm pretty sure I can get most of my essential programs and documents uploaded without having to pay. I also have a website where I can store anything that Google or Mediafire might consider "questionable" should SOPA or a version of it ever pass. But the thing about paid accounts is - if you miss a payment, there goes your information. I'm not planning on my husband losing his job - he's an engineer and there are no lack of jobs for engineers - but you never know.

But still, I was a programmer BC (Before Children) and I know how essential backups are. And I know that you always have backups of your backups. So why didn't I? I don't know. But you can bet I won't be making that mistake again. I will buy another external hard drive. I don't always have internet access, the instability of my satellite internet at home guarantees that if we have a hard downpour, my internet will go out. So it will be nice having a hard backup in case of lack of internet. But getting things stored somewhere reliable where I can  get to them again, even if I have to go to the library to do it, will be a very good thing.

My husband is also a CBCP (Certified Business Continuity Professional), where basically they train you to think like a terrorist and examine all the ways a disaster can strike. I think my husband taught them more than they taught him, but I digress. Between the two of us, you'd think we would have had a better plan in place so that we didn't loose all of our important data. But we didn't.

Although, the one most important thing I learned in my college programming classes? KEEP YOUR PAPER DOCUMENTS. All of this nonsense about a paperless business world is crap. If you have a piece of paper documenting your information, it trumps whatever the computer says every time. Walk into any bank with your deposit receipt and even if that deposit isn't in their computer, you'll get your money.

So consider what you have on your computer and what you absolutely have to have, or what would be very expensive to replace. And then backup your backups. Keep your paper documents. Store whatever you can in reliable online storage - XYZ.com Computer Backup Company does NOT count as reliable.

Learn from my mistakes, people. Because even someone trained to avoid this can lose their files. And it's going to cost me a lot of time, effort, and money to replace what I lost.