Backup Plan

If you're in the area on Sunday, March 28, come join me at the Niles Public Library, 6960 W. Oakton, Niles,Illinois at 1:30, when I'll discuss Social Networking for Fun and/or Promotion.

Your computer is infected. You stand the chance of losing everything you spent so long to put on there. That's not the time to be considering a backup plan, but I confess to being guilty.

About three weeks ago, the DH clicked on a link on our home computer resulting in havoc. All kinds of messages popped up about spyware on the computer. We knew better than to click on them and instead kept shutting the machine down. Those insistent messages still popped up, so we had to call McAfee to get the situation resolved.

We were lucky. The technician knew what to do, removed the offending program and the computer, with all our precious information stored on it, was saved.

Unfortunately, it's not always that simple. Years ago, when we had our first computer, we ran into a nasty virus. The only way to use the computer again was to wipe everything off and start fresh.

I keep meaning to implement a backup plan and really need to do so. I've paid for Flickr and have some photos stored on there. I also have an account at Adobe.com where I can store photos. I just haven't gotten around to doing so. I do have almost every photo I've ever taken still on memory cards, plus many are accessible on the Net, still I really need to get more organized in the event of catastrophe.

I send my works in progress to my alter-email almost every day just in case, so I don't lose them. Still, I've got lots of other documents stored in my computers which I'd hate to lose, yet I've not bothered to protect them. I need to get a system going and do that before it's too late. I have an external hard drive. I just need to bother and get it done, although to be really safe I should probably also send my documents off online to somewhere like DataSafe, which Dell recommends. Even that isn't foolproof. What if the company went out of business? Still, it would be better than not taking any action.

What about you? Do you have a Backup Plan? Do you use it?