A few days ago I had a painful conversation with a friend. He'd been laid off from his job after nearly ten years and in the process lost access to his contact lists, his passwords for all his online activities and his personal music and photos. We all know intellectually that it's wrong and maybe even stupid to store anything personal on a work computer but in practice, we all slip up. I know I'm guilty of this: my work computer is a reflection of my 12 years at Symantec. It's a veritable Cairo Geniza (or storage room) of presentations, strategy documents, even videos from business trips around the world.
Hopefully I'm not about to be handed a cardboard box and a pink slip but few of us have a guarantee with our job. Is it a coincidence that my work laptop has started exhibiting signs of impending doom? I hadn't seen so many blue screens since earlier operating system days and occasionally my computer stops recognizing its own DVD drive. Not good. Definitely time for me to take action and rescue my data before it goes away entirely. I've gathered some suggestions for what to address that are practical if your computer is at risk or your job is. The Wall Street Journal also covered this issue recently.
Back up!
You think we're kidding when we tell people to back up? C'mon people! Fewer than half of you ever backup and almost no one does it daily. The top item that gets lost in some kind of hardware or external drive failure are photos! And most of us cite photos as the top item to rescue in the event of a disaster. Get yourself some form of backup option immediately. The easiest options are external hard drives but these often fail. You should consider some of the online backup programs as another option, which has the added advantage of being a second physical location for your files. If your backup is in the same building as your primary storage, a fire, flood or other natural disaster renders your data and your backup useless to you. Those of you who are a bit more advanced should consider disk imaging software like Norton Ghost but make sure you store the image copies offsite (at work? Mail to a relative?) I just signed up for Norton Online Backup and in a few minutes got a daily routine of backups going.
What files you want to backup are your concern. Make sure if you are planning to store the backup onto your personal property, you don't make the mistake of transferring or copying anything that is company property. Theft is theft, even if it's only a file. I suggest you look at your photos, your desktop, your contact lists, browser bookmarks or favorites, toolbar plug-ins, any form of password management you're using. You'd hate to have to recover your every online password, especially if you registered using your work email for the account. Or is that just me who does that? Oops.
Contact Lists
Whether you use a Blackberry or Outlook or another form of contact management, if your hardware device is company property you stand to lose years of networking effort if this data isn't stored somewhere else. And if you lose your phone and haven't synced the data to another location, you might also find yourself in trouble. Consider consolidating in an online form such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Other online contact management systems exist like Plaxo. See if your cellphone provider provides an online storage option. And if you are a power user or professional salesperson, consider some of the fee based services offering far great sales-related features. Here's an online review that covers several options.
Passwords
Using a yellow sticky note for your login password? You can and should do better. There are numerous options for password management. Some standalone, some built in to things you already use. But make sure they have a portable aspect in case your computer is lost physically or virtually. The Norton Identity Safe feature built into Norton Internet Security is very easy to use and can be backed up and restored onto another computer where you use the product. Remember, you'll want to have Norton Internet Security on both the work and the home computer.
Do you register with your work email address on everything? What a lot of work you will have to unwind this mistake should you lose your job! Better to register using a free email such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo and then forward that email address to your work address. Then should tragedy ensure and you need to change your work email in a hurry it's one step rather than several dozen. Note, not all free email programs offer forwarding services but there are 3rd party applications you can use to help you consolidate the work.
Photo storage
I've used so many different online photo services for printing digital photos and creating family albums. I do have some caveats to consider before you use an online service as a storage system. First, some free sites will charge you if the amount of space you use exceeds their free limit. Also, if you aren't active on an account they will delete your images. Some lack the option to send you a disk of your files, even for a fee. There is also the risk that some of these services will go out of business, though my experience has been that their customer accounts gets purchased by a more viable competitor and you the consumer have almost no transition pain.
I recommend looking into using some of the backup recommendations and considering engaging the assistance of your family and friends. When giving someone a new digital photo frame, be a little selfish and put your most precious photo images on there to "prime it". When I gave my mother a iPod a few years back, I put a library of favorite photos of the grandchildren on there so she could use it as a digital "brag book". It's nice to know if disaster were to strike at home, we'd be able to recover some of our favorite photos from disparate locations such as Grandma's iPod, online photo sites, Facebook and Flickr.
Do you have other suggestions on this topic? Write to me and share them! marian@norton.com