Nith Sisombath

When Technology Goes Down
June 19, 2008

I’ve enjoyed the blog postings about Mac and PC from Stephen Nold. Being a bit of a techie myself, I found them amusing, entertaining and somewhat informative. But whether you are a Mac or a PC the most important thing you can do is back up your information. Because it’s a pain in the neck to have to rewrite a whole new proposal two days before it’s due when you’ve worked on it for two weeks. It’s also a terrible waste of time to have to re enter all of you contacts from business cards. I just experienced that lately.

 A few weeks ago my laptop screen went blank and kept on turning on and off. I ordered a new screen and took out the hard drive, placed it in an external hard drive reader and found that the hard drive was working. That was my chance to copy everything over to my desktop at home but I didn’t. I brought the hard drive with me to a business I was working at for the week plugged it into a USB port on one of their computers, the USB port ended up shorting out the card on the hard drive rendering the drive useless. Needless to say things had just gotten worse for me on the technology front. Lucky I had done a complete back up of the drive. 

The unlucky thing was it was over two weeks old so my most recent projects were all lost. I think about two weeks worth of work rendered into oblivion makes me sad. But I did learn a very important lesson. No matter how new your laptop or tech device is back up the information as often as possible, everyday if possible. I had a friend with a brand new Apple laptop he was very excited about how thin and good looking it was but wasn’t so excited when the hard drive failed less than a year from the original purchase date. Lucky it was under warranty so they sent him a new hard drive and he had everything backed up to his server through the backup program that came with Apple.

I guess I shouldn’t have laughed too hard because my refurbished IBM laptop gave me problems a couple of months later. I was just over a year old. I replaced the screen, put in a new hard drive and found that the mother board was the faulty component. Oh, well that will teach me not to buy a refurbished laptop in the future especially when a new one is only a couple of hundred dollars more and you can have Windows XP on it too.

Enough about that here are some tips to help when you’ve got important project’s you’re working on…especially if you’re a traveler on the go.

1.       When sending a proposal or presentation to clients make sure to send a copy to your web based email box. (Yahoo, Google, MSN, and lots of others offer email account with over a gig of memory for no charge.) You do have to have internet access to get to your proposal or presentation but that is widely available and will save you if something happens to your laptop when you’re traveling.

 2.       Get an online storage account…lots of websites offer free online storage at no charge. If you don’t want to CC yourself of a file it too big to email you can upload it and have it accessible for your client if needed. Depending on the size of your file and upload speed it can take some time but then again it’s versatile, easily accessible from anywhere and free. (A site called http://www.adrive.com/ offers up to 50GB of free storage and gives you the option of creating a shared drive too. The interface is pretty easy to navigate and use. It’s also very easy to upload and download files.)

 3.       Use the free space on your phone…most phones  now come with loads of memory or have a memory card slot where you can place a 1Gig, 2 Gig or even 4Gig MicroSD card on it. Most of these cards come with adapters so you can plug it into your computer’s hard drive and place your files on there. Most of the time there is a lot of empty space on the cards or it’s just filled with music. So use the empty space. (This is a good idea because it’s a lot easier to lose a small USB memory stick then your phone. I usually know where my phone is at all times.)

4.       Most importantly back up your data. Nowadays hard drives are so inexpensive. I saw a 250Gig external hard drive for under $100.00 so there is no reason not to have an external hard drive to back up to. Also both Mac and Windows have built in programs that will help you back up and recover your files. With hard drives being so inexpensive and the technology to back it up included in the operating systems Mac’s and PC’s have no excuses for not backing up their files.

By the way did I mention that I dropped my cell phone into the toilet the same day my laptop died? When it rains it pours.

Posted by Nith Sisombath on June 19, 2008 | Comments (1)