Hurricane Alex was upgraded to the season’s first hurricane as of 10 pm CDT Tuesday, June 29th, but it may be only the beginning. Many weather experts are forming comparisons between the 2010 hurricane season and the 2005 season (which produced 28 named storms, including Hurricane Katrina) and Joe Bastardi (Chief Hurricane Meteorologist for AccuWeather.com) predicted that 18 to 21 named storms will occur in the 2010 season, four of which are expected to occur during July. What does this mean for you and I? How do we prepare? What do we prepare?
For any hurricane season, there are a few basics to concern yourself with. You should have a safe place to weather the storm and enough food and water to last for at least a few weeks. Check for flashlights, batteries and other essentials. But then what? It seems like we always forget something important when rushed into situations like this. Imagine the post-storm recovery. You might have evacuated the area or worse, your home might have been destroyed by flooding or tornadoes. What then? Were you prepared to start over or deal with the enormous task of insurance claims and a mountain of paperwork? Wait, the paperwork!!!!! That’s where today’s article comes in.
Before it’s too late, before you say “I wish I had thought of that,” before you have time to forget about it…. you need to locate and backup your important documents.
That fact alone should be enough to frighten every computer owner on the planet. We all have photographs, movies, important documents, emails, etc. that we do not want to lose for any reason, yet I find very few PC users who regularly backup the contents of their computer(s). Every one of us has experienced a moment when we thought our PC had crashed and the first thought was “I should have backed up my files!” Why is it then that so few people perform regular backups? Is is Time…. Money…. Knowledge?
Normally on the release day of a highly anticipated new movie, game or album, I would find myself 30 people back in a line outside of a “big box” store. Somehow, the level of excitement is elevated by the fact that I’m sharing the last few moments of life without the new media amongst a group of people with the same interest. We’d talk about how we had read magazine articles and found information on the internet that said this or that. Then, the doors open and we poor into the store for our bounty.
It is the last day of the Vista era and, even though many of us will still be using XP and Vista in some capacity, tomorrow marks a new dawn for computing. Before you can make the dash to the next generation, there are some things you are going to need to do. For those of you who will NOT be making the change, don’t change the channel just yet. You will benefit from today’s topic as well, backups!
