The client I went to this morning was writing a book – it was more like a learned essay in truth – 20 A4 pages.

He’s been writing it for over a year and, putting it politely, his laptop is not in its first flush of youth.  I think his wife is hoping Father Christmas might bring a new one.  He has a memory stick – but being an older gentleman he’s afraid of it.  His son has put some documents on it, but he’s struggling to work out how to transfer his photos as well.

He only has around 3 GB of data to back up, including his photos and that essay.  Easily fitted on his 16GB memory stick.  But what do you do if you struggle to remember how to transfer data to the memory stick, and are afraid of misplacing the stick?

I casually mentioned that I use an online backup service.  I wasn’t immediately thinking it was the right choice for him as he has relatively little data to preserve.  The instant I mentioned it both he and his wife leapt at the idea.  We ordered Mozy and when I left it was doing its initial backup, which it said would take around a day.  (To put that in context it took two weeks of leaving my laptop on 24/7 to do my initial backup)

Caller: “My computer went bang last night”.

Me: “Oh dear, what do you mean when you say it went bang?”

Caller:  ”I turned it on, there was a bang and nothing happened.  So I tentatively turned it off at the wall, turned it back on and still nothing happened”.

Me:  ”It sounds as if your power supply might have failed.  You could take it to Peter (our local repair shop) and see if he can fix it for you”

Caller:  ”The thing is, it’s nearly 6 years old, should I save the money and put it towards a new one?”

We continued chatting.  I explained that her hard drive was probably ok so Peter would be able to rescue her documents and photos and he might even be able to put it in a case for her so she can connect it to her new computer.  The problem is that all this costs money, she’s on a limited budget and her 10 year old washing machine is also on its last legs.

Why am I telling you all this and what has this to do with backups?  Simple – she doesn’t have any backups.  None at all.  She clearly wants to get the information from her old hard drive onto her new laptop, if at all possible.  If she takes it to Peter she will have to pay to have that done, on top of paying for a new laptop.  Money she can ill afford right now – with a new washing machine imminent and Christmas approaching (and new baby twin grandchildren to buy for)

I can’t stress often enough just how important backups are.  I also can’t stress often enough how wonderful and convenient online backup is.  Not only are your documents safely stored off site – but in a situation like my client faces you can access them from anywhere by logging into your online storage area.  Until she can afford a new computer of her own she could go to the library or a friend’s house and still have easy access to all her stuff.

Don’t get caught out.  Not having backups is a false economy and could be a very expensive and heart wrenching one.

He’d done a pretty good job of setting up the new laptop, but had got confused about transferring his photos and music and transferring the emails and address book from his old computer, running Windows XP to his new laptop running Windows 7.

Somewhere along the line we also started creating the restore discs.  If you purchase a new laptop ALWAYS create the restore discs.  The days when computers came with a set of CDs with all the drivers on are long gone.  You have to create the restore discs yourself.  This usually takes 2 or 4 DVDs.  I keep a stack of DVDs in the boot of my car.  I see many new computers whose owners just keep clicking on “remind me later” when the reminder to create the restore discs pops up.

Don’t put it of – do it!  Hopefully you will never need those DVDs, but better safe than sorry.

While the first DVD was being written he asked me about creating backups of his book.  The entire content of his book to date was on a memory stick.  That was all – just on a memory stick.  It wasn’t on his PC, it wasn’t on his laptop and it wasn’t on the university computer.

He already knew that having documents just on the memory stick wasn’t a backup.  He also realised, without me telling him, that if his laptop is stolen or lost along with the memory stick then the book has gone.  He asked me what solution I recommended.  The university technicians had already told him that he should use “the cloud” for his emails, so when I explained to him about using Mozy as an online backup service he didn’t need any persuading.

The benefits were immediately obvious to him.  His data is safely stored offsite and will still be there if his laptop and memory stick are lost, stolen, or destroyed.  I told him to carry on using the memory stick as well and to store the content of the book on his laptop – you can’t have too many backups – you can have too few.  The added benefit is that if he needs to edit the contents or show the book to someone when he is out and about without his laptop, he can log-in to his online storage area from another computer and access the documents.

I left him to sign up for the trial version.  Why don’t you do the same?  Sign up for the best online backup today – and sleep peacefully tonight.

They live in a rural location but are lucky enough to have broadband that works at nearly 6Mbs.  Not that you would have know that with the old laptop.  Even loading an internet page took forever.

A few weeks ago, in desperation, they asked me if I could come round and speed up the computer.  I solemnly pronounced that it was overdue for retirement and sent them off to the computer shop with a list of do’s and don’ts.  We’d done some homework online and they had picked out a couple of models they liked the look of that were on offer.

You won’t be surprised to hear that when they first entered the shop, the models that were on offer were nowhere to be seen.  Obviously the shop wanted them to purchase something more expensive.  However, armed with their list, they persevered and managed to buy one of the discounted models.  Much to the chagrin of the sales assistant who told them they “didn’t want to buy an end of range model”.

The computer is now set up and running well – it took about an hour and a half.  Contrast that with the time it took me to set up my own laptop 2 years ago.  It took me all day.  I have a large amount of documents and photos, lots of software and lots of email addresses to set up.  Fortunately I had the best online backup on my side and was able to log into my account and download the data onto the hard drive of my new laptop.

Imagine what would have happened if my friends had a lot of data to transfer.  Their old laptop works so slowly that just transferring the data would have taken hours.  This is one area where a best online backup is the perfect answer.  There would have been no need to fiddle about transferring the data.  We would have connected the new laptop to the internet, logged into their online backup account and, hey presto, have downloaded all the data.

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.)

He has a website where he showcases his work.  All his photos are stored on high capacity external hard drives with (fortunately) the originals kept on CDs and DVDs and locked in a safe.

He spent a happy afternoon uploading some photos to his website.  To do this he used Filezilla, which is ftp software for uploading files directly to your website.

For some reason he couldn’t explain he decided that the left-hand side of his screen (all the files on his external hard drive) looked cluttered, so he decided to “delete the files from Filezilla”.  It took nearly an hour, apparently.  It was only then that he realised that he had deleted the files from his hard drive.

He panicked and rang me.  I told him not to touch the hard drive, but to take it to the local computer store who might be able to retrieve the contents using file recovery software.  Unfortunately, by the time he’d rung me he had tried to replace some of the photos by uploading them from some of the CDs stored in his safe.

I can only imagine how he must have felt when he realised what he had done.  Can YOU imagine how long it would have taken him to trawl through the CDs in his safe, find ALL the photos he’d deleted and reupload them to his hard drive?

If he’d had an online backup service in place, he could have retreived ALL of his photos, correctly ordered in their folders and just downloaded them to his hard drive.  Yes, downloading that much data would have taken time, but he could have spent that time drinking a few cups of tea, walking the dog or having dinner, rather than spending hours upon hours sifting through the CDs in his safe.

Today the question was asked because, by the sound of it, my client had accidentally hit Ctrl+A (highlighted all the document) and then immediately pressed Ctrl+S to save the document.  Once content on your document has been highlighted, pressing any key on the keyboard results in the highlighted text being deleted.  In this case that was all of it!  The result?  He’d save a blank document.  It’s contents had gone, so he panicked and turned off the computer.

If this happens to you.  DON’T PANIC.  If you turn off the computer you lose the chance to retrieve your data.  Don’t press every key in sight in the hope that something will happen.  Take a few deep breaths, calm down and then look for the “undo” icon.  It’s there in most word-processors and it’s your friend.  Clicking on undo will usually (with a few exceptions) undo whatever you last did – even if you have no idea what you’ve done.

If my client had done this, he would have got his text back.  As it is he saved a blank document and then turned of his computer.

Disaster?  Not totally.  He has two laptops and a trusty memory stick.  I have long since frightened him into copying everything he has worked on each day onto the memory stick and THEN copying it all onto the second laptop.  That way both laptops have the same document on and he can’t inadvertently make one lot of changes on one computer and another set of changes on the other computer.

He had a copy of the book he was writing that he had saved yesterday and copied onto his memory stick.  He’s lost what he wrote today, but still has a copy of what he had written previously.

He now fully understands the value of backups and will have to spend tomorrow rewriting what he’d already written today!

This morning my phone rang – a regular client calling to tell me their computer wouldn’t turn on.  I did a quick spin on the living room floor, donned my wonder woman outfit and headed off.

Sure enough, their computer wouldn’t turn on.  It did, once.  It displayed a screen full of gobbledook and then quietly died.  RIP.

I don’t do onsite repairs, I’m not a hardware person.  I sent them to the local repair shop in the hope he might be able to rescue the contents and asked them confidently if they’d done a backup lately.  I expected them to say yes, as I gave them my standard talk on the importance of doing your backups just a few weeks ago when I last visited.

Sheepish looks told me they hadn’t backed up since my last visit.  Fortunately they do have paper copies of their correspondence.

They are off to buy a new computer and when I install it I will subscribing them to an online backup service.

Believe me, this site isn’t a do as I say because I want your commission payments site.  It’s a do as I tell all my clients and as I do myself because I have seen the consequences with my own eyes site.  Although I don’t say no to the commissions, obviously.  We all have to earn a living.

If the power supply has simply failed, you all breathe a sigh of relief. Power supplies can be replaced, or the hard drive removed and read on another machine. Phew.

If the hard -drive has failed then it’s a different story. Often the disc has been failing for weeks, if not months, and the user has just repeatedly restarted the machine, whilst maybe telling themselves that perhaps they should think of buying a new one. Once the hard-drive has become unusable it is difficult and sometimes impossible for a sensible price to retrieve the data stored on it.

How many people do you know who enjoy taking photos with their camera or phone and who store them all on their computer? What will happen to those photos if the computer is lost, stolen, damage or just simply breaks?

How many school and college students do you know who store their schoolwork on their laptop and/or a memory stick? How many memory sticks has your child lost? What will happen if your child’s computer is stolen or lost? What will happen to their precious course work?

How many people do you know that run small businesses from home? How many store all their client information, orders and booking records on their laptop? Most won’t have backup paperwork – many orders or enquiries are dealt with entirely online. If the business computer is stolen or damaged, what will happen to those business records?

I’m a computer troubleshooter and I know the answers to all the above questions from long experience. It’s best summed up in a single word. Panic.

I regularly see clients who want to “tidy up” the filing system on their computers. I had just such a client today, which is why I’m writing this. She had most of her photos on DVDs, so she was going to delete them from her computer. I remained calmed and explained that this wasn’t a good idea.

Backups. I’ll say that again. Backups. Everyone needs them and you can’t have too many.

What Backup isn’t

Backing up your computer data doesn’t mean copying it to a DVD, external hard-drive or memory stick and removing it from your computer. That isn’t a backup – you only have one copy of the data. DVDs, memory sticks and external drives can break, get lost or stolen.

What Backup is

Backup means having at least two copies of your data, and preferably more. Then if one copy is lost, stolen or strays you have another copy to fall back on.

What will you do if your computer is lost, stolen or damaged along with it’s accompany backup media? Many people keep their backups in their laptop bag, computer desk or office computer drawer.

If the whole lot disappears you are in trouble.

There is a solution to this. Use a remote backup service. An online, external, off-site backup service that stores all your precious documents in a remote location. You can access your stored data from any computer, anywhere at any time. So if your own computer dies, is destroyed or stolen you have peace of mind, knowing that your data is safe.

I practice what I preach and I don’t think I would sleep at night if I didn’t know that my computer is being constantly backed up to my online backup service.