Peace of Mind Organizing

Are you backing up your computer?

15 May 2012

We all know it’s smart to back up our computers. (We also know it’s smart to do lots of other stuff we might not be doing, like changing our oil religiously every 3,000 miles.) Sometimes actually backing up the computer feels like a big deal.

Sometimes it comes down to too many choices. Should I back up in the cloud? On an external hard drive? Some other way?

Several years ago I blogged about how hard it was for me to bite the bullet and use Time Machine to back up my hard drive. Once I did that, the whole process was automatic. So now I have the comfort of knowing that my computer is completely backed up onto a hard drive.

But what if there’s a fire? Or a break in and both my laptop and external hard drive, which sits next to it, are stolen? Then my Time Machine back up wouldn’t do me any good.

So I decided a year ago that I needed to have a secondary back up. It’s a belt and suspenders approach. I selected Carbonite as my back up service, because it’s highly regarded. That was fine, until I noticed that my MacBook Pro’s battery didn’t seem to be holding a charge very well, despite being quite new. I took it to the Apple store and learned that Carbonite was running all the time and chewing up my battery life. Unfortunately, Mac users can’t schedule back ups in Carbonite. The backup had to be either enabled or disabled. And I knew that if I had to remember to manually enable it, it wasn’t going to happen.

So there I was again, faced with more choices. There are lots of online back up systems. I started doing research. I asked around among colleagues. And then I decided that, in this case as in so many things, good enough was better than perfect. I just needed to make a decision, so that my computer wouldn’t be unprotected. I went with CrashPlan Pro , which allows me a variety of ways to work with my back ups and avoid draining my battery.

What about you? Are you backing up your computer regularly? Is it automatic, so that you don’t have to think about it? I have such peace of mind knowing that my data are backed up in two places. If this is on your should do list, I encourage you to bite the bullet and get it onto your done list!

Tagged with: decisions, empowerment, obstacles, procrastination

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