Backup backup backup backup.....

A dear friend had a financial blow over the weekend. Her husband, a finish carpenter, had all his tools stolen from his vehicle. It seems some thieves -- who apparently had been watching for the opportunity -- backed into their driveway around 2:30 a.m., wrenched off the tailgate of the truck, emptied the contents within two minutes, and ran.

It's a shattering loss, financially as well as impacting his livelihood. Additionally, there are psychological ramifications -- besides the sense of violation, he had a certain emotional connection to the tools he had been collecting for over 25 years and which he used to provide for his family.

Anyway, yesterday this friend and I were chatting via instant message and we started speculating what things we would be devastated to lose to thieves or disasters. The first thing that popped into my head: my laptop.

The trouble with a laptop, you see, is all the valuable data that tends to accumulate on it. In my case, it's not just my writing; it's all the photos I take, all the articles I collect, all the links I record...

This is why I'm a huge huge HUGE advocate of backing up computers, something my dad always hammered into my head as critical. He's right, too, since backups have saved my fanny any number of times.

But a year ago I had to migrate to a new laptop, and for a variety of reasons never got around to backing it up. It came with a built-in backup program from Dell which wanted me to back my data up to the Cloud (NOT!!!!!), and knowing that my valuable data were vulnerable always nagged at me.

So, in light of my friend's reminder, yesterday Don installed a backup program to my computer and we did a full-scale backup to an external hard drive.

Then, as extra protection, I also backed up specific files (photos, my writing, etc.) to another external hard drive.

Also -- and I'll thank Granny Miller for this -- I backed up my blog (Granny lost her entire blog a few years ago, a devastating blow).

I can't begin to describe the feeling of security all this backing up data gave me, so I'm passing on the reminder to all you dear readers. Backing up files, photos, etc. is critical in today's high-tech world, where data loss can come from any number of directions.

Please, do it today!

Welcome back, Granny!

Some comments on my last blog post reminded me -- we all need to join together and welcome back Granny Miller!

Granny Miller's blog, if you recall, disappeared a couple of years ago (July 2010) -- a catastrophic loss for her faithful followers. Apparently it was an error on Granny's part. As she wrote, "At the time I accidently destroyed my website, I was caring for a very ill family member. I was planning to retire GRANNY MILLER at the end of the 2010 anyway. Believe me, the loss of my website in those days was the least of my worries."

Granny said it took her over sixteen months to face up to the data disaster, but from the looks of her new website, she's recovered beautifully.

Welcome back, Granny Miller -- we've missed your warm, cheerful, useful, informational, spiffy-snazzy posts!

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On a related note, Granny's accidental destruction of her blog underscores the need for regular backups of everything computer-related. I do a full-scale backup of my computer's hard drive about once a week (and use a thumb drive to back up any important files on a day-to-day basis), but Granny's experience taught me I need to back up my blog on a regular basis as well.

Blogger changed to a new format a couple months ago (ug!), but I found some instructions for backing up Blogger blogs on this site, Living Prepared.

Here are the directions:

In your Blog's control panel, if you click and open the Settings Tab you will see a Blog Tools section, click on that tab. It will open another window and you will see an option to Import Blog, Export Blog and Delete Blog. Clicking on the ‘Export Blog’ will allow you to save a copy of the entire contents of your Blog to your computer. A drop down window will allow you to pick where you want to save the file. It’s very simple to use this feature.

(Import Blog will allow you to restore your Blog should it become corrupted or lost by simply using your saved back-up copy)

Remember folks, as Granny Miller can testify -- a stitch in time saves nine. Backing up your computer/blog/whatever can save an enormous amount of headache, heartache, and work.

Now excuse me, I'm going to back up my blog. Again.