This is Important, I didn’t know this one.
I spent a fairly large proportion of the nineties and the naughties working as an IT Manager (Ed: The sentence for a violent crime would have been shorter) and spent many hours devising and implementing multi-layered backup systems to provide business continuity if something went wrong.
These included the obvious, spare equipment for anything critical to the business, backup data copies if a hard disk drive went down, remote data copies in case the place burned down etc. etc. We even had a flood movement plan to shift the contents of the computer room upstairs in the event of the river (just behind the warehouse) bursting its banks. Of all the full disaster recovery plans that was actually the one that came closest to being put into action when the river level rose alarmingly one week and we were put on thirty minute evacuation notice. We had trolleys on standby and a my staff were ready to strip the wires from the back of the racks and take the racks upstairs while my boss bugged out and took the data copies home to his hilltop house.
We did in fact have to run the telecoms plan for real when the local council, in the process of installing a new lamppost down the street put their auger straight through the main trunk telephone cable and severed the telephone connections for dozens of businesses, including ours. That was the day my insistence on having two telephone suppliers, one copper, one digital paid off big time.
That’s digression really, and background. How backed up are you?
Like most of us, I bet you backup your data to an external drive. If you don’t keep a backup copy, even at this level then I can only shake my head in sorrow.
However, what do you do with that drive? Does it sit there permanently attached to your computer? If so, it’s a good mechanical protection for the drive breaking, but is it much good for anything else? What good is it to you in the event of fire, flood, theft or as my business partner found out in September, earthquake? Luckily she didn’t lose anything. What about lightning strike? Have you ever considered the result of that? Last week in town we had an electricity sub-station torched by some tosspot of a youth. The nearest couple of hundred houses experienced a power surge that damaged electrical equipment. If it had been your computer it could well have gone, and if your external drive was attached it could have gone too, irrecoverably.
I’ve got a surge protector on my system, you crow. Ah, but have you overloaded it, as you add more and more plug-in equipment to it?
I have two external drives, one is connected to the computer purely for the time it takes to back up, and they are used in rotation. One of them is always offsite.
Even that isn’t enough as a Facebook friend of mine discovered this week. (Ed: Now we’re coming to the meat of it). Someone, she has no idea who, made a complaint about her Facebook account, she doesn’t even know what the complaint was about. Her account and her fan page have been deleted. She wasn’t even given a chance to defend herself; there is no right of appeal. At a stroke she’s lost everything on there, friends list, posts, notes, contacts everything!
Since, as authors our promotional work is usually centred on our blogs and Facebook account she is utterly devastated. Given the sloth with which Facebook respond to any kind of query she’s had to start again. She’s also a best-selling author, who really “worked” Facebook to its fullest extent, losing it is a body-blow to her.
Do you backup your Facebook account?
I have to admit I didn’t. I didn’t even now you did not can, nor did I even consider I should.
So please, everyone, back up your account there.
Instructions are as follows:
Click on Account
Click on Account Settings
Under Settings, one up from the bottom of the list is a heading “Download your information”.
Click on the Learn more link next to it.
Follow the instructions from there.
They will e-mail you to confirm and will provide you with link to download a compressed file containing it.
Please go there and get it done, and then add it to your regular security routine.
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