Backing Up

Being an education professional in the field of computer design, I have always told students to back up their work, or else they may lose everything they’ve been working on for the last class period. I also tell students to back up their work in at least two locations online, and on a flash drive just in case their file gets lost or accidentally deleted. Imagine my shock when I discovered that the only copy of my business meeting minutes that I was the secretary for was lost when I had a hard drive crash. I sold my old Acer Aspire One to a friend and thought I saved it on my external hard drive. Well, it beautifully crashed on Monday, and I realized that I didn’t have the document on ANY OTHER DRIVE. So, after panicking and cursing the technology that served me so well up to this point, I called my friend that I sold my netbook to and hoped that the file was still on the computer. Nope, no luck. Then, I remembered. I did a Norton Ghost backup on the netbook, and the backup was on another external hard drive. So, low and behold I had a copy of the file I needed despite my best attempt to screw everything up. So, if you have important documents you’ve been working on, make sure you save it on the computer, on a flash drive and the cloud (like Google Docs), so you are sure to have at least one copy survive a total failure.