darph.plock

Last month a 3 year old girl died in a car crash. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and flew right through the windshield. When the police asked the parents as to why they didn’t make their kid wear a seatbelt, they answered “so far nothing had happened, so we thought we didn’t need it.”

Most of the various tidbits of information in your life probably are digital by now. It starts with the cell phone number of your boyfriend that you didn’t memorize but only exists in your cell phone that is crashed when you have that little accident where that bystander offers to call him while you’re hauled into the trunk of the ambulance car. And it doesn’t end with 10 years worth of photographs that are only digital today.

When our kids will be grown up in 20 years or so and they will ask “Mommy, Daddy, why are there no pictures of you when you were young?”, do you want to tell them “because buying a second hard disk was too much hassle”?

If you’re a knowledge worker and don’t keep redundant backups you better be on your Creator’s favourable side. I had this conversation numerous times: “You need to help me, my thesis is due tomorrow and my computer doesn’t start/my USB-Stick can’t be read! This is important!” – “Do you have a copy?” – “No?” – “Then it wasn’t important.”

Every bit of digital information in your life quite simply does not exist if it does not exist in at least two physically different locations at the same time. If your laptop or its hard disk die, don’t expect  a warning.

“But I don’t know anything about Computers!” is not an excuse. It’s your tool, learn to handle it or else it will come around to bite you in the ass. If you don’t want to worry about the technical details of incremental backups and scripted automation at the very least go buy a Macintosh and an external hard drive which you use for TimeMachine backups (which has saved my butt on several occasions). Yes you pay a premium but failing a deadline for a prestigious client because you didn’t will cost you at least as much.

Read this. Listen to the guy. He’s smarter than both of us. And the act on it. Coz, hell yes, you do need it before it is too late.