It is the first week of the new year, and on my first day back to work, I’ve been encountering several issues with tech services I’ve been using regular and have come to rely on.
First, I tried to access some of my archived slide presentations on my SlideShare account and got this:
Then I went to log into my MailChimp account and was met with this message:
Should I be afraid?
As I move into the new year and my goal of sharing useful, sensible information about technology, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind myself – and you – that the tech we rely on doesn’t always work. Sure, that probably isn’t news to most of you who have experienced Fail Whales and other signs of tech outages and mishaps.
However, the even more important message here is that technology could fail drastically or permanently. What if Google lost all of your email stored in Gmail? What if all of your documents are destroyed in a computer meltdown? Where does a tech glitch go from hassle to irretrievable loss, from emotional to devastating?
In our world of (over)reliance on digital information and technology, what are we doing to protect our data – and ourselves – from irreparable harm? With information becoming so valuable to every aspect of our work and lives, shouldn’t we take stock in how we manage it?
I’ve been very guilty of not backing up my computer…again. I was using an Apple Time Capsule but it stopped working, oh, about 358 days ago. I mailed it to Apple for a known defect repair, and it took over a month to get it back because of my crazy rural Alaska address issues. I even brought it to the Mac shop (4 hours drive from here), and they said it was fixed, but when I got back home, it still wouldn’t work.
So I’m thinking of checking out Carbonite. If you’re using it, I’d love to hear your thoughts or recommendations of other options. I think the key is to having both offline and in the cloud backups for all critical data. I pledge to work on my data backup plan for 2012 and share it with you next month.
Update: Both services came up a few hours later. Panic subsided.
Do you have a data protection and backup plan for your critical files? If not, what are you going to do about it?
