The Shoemaker’s Children

You remember the Shoemaker’s lesson, don’t you?  It’s always the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. And so it was that after thirty years of writing about PCs and wagging my finger at those who tempted fate by not backing up regularly, I did it myself.  The entire episode has made me feel a little addle-brained, a lot chagrined, and like a cautionary tale.

It started when I bought the new Dell XPS—fully loaded. When was the last time you moved three years of work from one PC to another? Seriously, it consumed my free time for about three weeks until I had things the way I wanted them. You know the little utilities, the passwords to websites, the cleanup of the contact list, and what seemed like the millionth installation of Microsoft Office. (Tougher than ever because I can no longer read the unique 26-character registration code without a magnifying glass!)

I’d been using Symantec’s Norton 360 pretty happily on my older PC and using their online storage backup. The last step for the new PC’s inaugural voyage should have been to move my Norton account to a new machine. In fact, Symantec could make the moving process easier, too, but that’s fodder for a different story.

Let’s just say I had to travel with either the old PC or the new so I took a calculated risk.  After the trip, I returned home but somehow the urgency of a backup strategy slipped away. Everyday stuff was keeping me too busy.

Next trip was from NY to Boston by car, with family and lots of bags. In the hotel parking lot, I set the laptop on the hood of the car to clean the wrappers and cups. By the time I got to the front desk of the hotel, I was all too aware that my most important appendage was not with me. I’d left it on the hood of the car. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes but that was enough. Spent a week trying to capture the crooks by running my remote access and hoping they’d log on. No luck.  The only lucky thing about my loss was I did have a back up of my old machine. 

Lessons learned? Use some sort of anti-theft device, Lo-Jack is pretty popular and it’s much more sophisticated than it was a few years back.  And yes, backup your data (I prefer keeping my data off the premises on a remote system like Symantec’s.  That way the entire process is automated and requires no action on my part (other than payment per megabyte stored).  I could do the backups myself, but life is short. And yes, I’m considering hiring a mover the next time I need to move PCs.

Robin Raskin