7 Tips for Protecting Your Data

I was working on a Sunday afternoon putting together information for my next book and working on some graphics to upload to the blueprintBOOKS website to list a couple of white papers when Word shut down, my graphics program aborted and I got the blue screen of death. Well, this has happened in the past and when I rebooted, everything came back up and I only lost a few tidbits of text. This time I was completely wrong - the system had a major crash, my hard drive had totally failed. I still thought this may not be such a big deal as I had some backups. The only problem was the question as to when I had last backed up the system. Was it yesterday or was it a couple of weeks ago?
Finally the computer rebooted, it took 40 minutes to boot up completely. I was now praying that I could recover something! Now to open Outlook. It took another 30 minutes and now I knew I was in deep trouble. Now my life was passing quickly before my eyes.
I thought I was prepared but obviously I was not prepared enough. I did have a good plan in place for such events and I had implemented most of it. My biggest problem was not checking up on the backup process to make sure it was doing everything I wanted automatically - I simply trusted the system. So what can you do to minimize damage from a hard drive crash?

1. Use a USB drive or some other device to do a full back up each week
2. Do an incremental backup each day of the week
3. Keep you contacts and calendar in several places such as a Treo, Plaxo, or other online service
4. Keep details on projects on CDs - just remember to update the information on a regular basis
5. Remove old projects and information from your system by burning them to CDs or using other methods
6. For accounting information, print your reports once a week and place in a binder
7. Use your backup system to recover documents or if you do not have a backup system in place, you can always "print" your work as you complete it (not really recommended)

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. is a speaker, author (over 170 books, articles, and publications), and consultant. She has provided marketing, sales, business development and training expertise for companies such as Peet's Coffee & Tea, Varian Medical Systems, Accenture, Avaya, Cisco Systems to name a few. Dr. Daoust has also done extensive work with small businesses in developing their marketing, training, and operational plans. You may contact Dr. Daoust at BizMechanix.com You may also view her latest publications at BlueprintBooks.com Dr. Daoust also writes for the National Networker theNationalNetworker.com

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