Fridays With Maxell

The picture above is a rare one indeed. It is not because it is of me, or the fact that I am in Red Square in Moscow. It is rare because it is one of five pictures that survived that trip. Here is the story in a nutshell.

In 2003 I went to Moscow to do some orphanage work. During the three weeks I was there, I took almost 300 pictures that were extremely important to my foundation. I spent all day conducting business. And every evening when I returned to my apartment, I would upload all the pictures I had taken that day with my camera to my lap top. Every time the upload was finished, a box would ask me if I wanted to back up the photos to a disc. Every time I clicked on “NO” because I was going to wait until I came back to America and back them all up on one disc after I sorted them out.

Imagine my panic here in America when I went to power up the laptop and nothing happened. The hard drive was dead. I tried to retrieve the data from the fried hard drive professionally by some serious computer geeks, but it couldn’t be done. Nobody is sure exactly what happened. I could blame Aeroflot airlines for the way they X-rayed my computer. I could blame the myriad of uncaring Russian workers who tossed expensive stuff around like they were bags of laundry. I could blame Chernobyl or the KGB. But the only one I really could blame was myself. Three hundred extremely important pictures were now gone! Five pictures remained because they were still in my camera and had not been cleared.

What is the moral to that story?

Imagine one day finding that the hard drive on your business computer is dead. Imagine all your customer names gone. Imagine all the financial data from your accounting software is missing. Imagine the panic you would feel as everything you have worked so hard to obtain suddenly vanishes.

Now imagine replacing the hard drive with a new one. And imagine putting in your back up and recovery disc and having every single piece of information restored like new.

You Must Do This Weekly!

Back up all your data weekly. When you first power up your Acer laptop, it asks you if you want to make a copy for back up. DO IT! And then weekly add the new data from the week to that disc.

I use a program I bought at Best Buy called Back It Up. It is inexpensive and very easy to use. I have it set to write the week’s information to disc every Friday afternoon. I do nothing but leave the computer on and have the disc in the CD Rom drive. It will add any new and changed data to the CDRW disc. If your data is extremely sensitive, you can literally back it up every night. But every Friday I have a date with Maxell.

Protect Yourself And Your Business!

• Make a copy of all the data on your machine TODAY!
• Back up your files regularly.
• Back up after you reconcile your bank statement every month regardless of what day of the week.

Like the old saying goes:

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”