As I’m writing this, I’m waiting for a new client to arrive. He phoned me a few days ago because a mutual friend and recommended me. He wanted to ask my advice on buying a new laptop. As he is driving past my door on the way home from visiting “one of his men”, he is going to all in and take a look at my laptop.
He calls his clients “his men” because he works (on a voluntary basis) for a charity that supports ex servicemen in our area.
When he phoned me he had just had a disaster with his laptop. I haven’t seen it, but from his description it was a little on the elderly side and had been playing up for ages. You know the sort of thing, suddenly freezes or turns itself off. Takes a couple of goes to turn on and runs erratically. He’d just been ignoring this until one day it didn’t turn on at all. The lights came on but the hard disc didn’t boot.
He took it to his local computer shop who said his hard-drive was damaged. I don’t know if they’ve managed to rescue any of the data as I don’t know the shop concerned – this gentleman actually lives “over the border” in Wales.
When he arrives he is going to get my standard talk about doing your backups and a strong recommendation that he purchases a subscription to a best online backup service. If he’d had that in place, all his documents would have been safe and he could have logged into his online user area and retrieved one or more of them from someone else’s computer.
Many charities and not for profit organisations are run by dedicated men and women such as this, usually working on their own computers from home. Many of clients help their local community in one way or another. Many have documents that are invaluable to their charity or organisation and many of them don’t have backup copies when they first meet me – often when they are panicking because their computer isn’t working or they’ve managed to corrupt or lost a document.
I’ll add a caveat here about highly confidential documents. If you have highly confidential data I will leave you to decide whether it is suitable for storing in a remote location. The rest of your data can and should be stored using an online backup service. Think carefully about the encryption and protection needed for highly confidential data. How often do we hear of laptops/memory sticks/ DVDs being stolen containing people’s confidential information?)
(I once had a client who worked for the probation service. Some of her documents contained details that could have identified individual prisoners. I didn’t even store those documents on my computer. I simply transferred them to a disc and gave them back to her.)