Take control of your personal data
You may have seen on the news or even online that New Zealand ISP Orcon recently had a failure with it email server recently. Which caused the loss of more than 200 peoples emails, contact and even calendars.
Watching the late news last night on TVNZ, I saw a woman from Tauranga who was complaining that the fail of her ISP’s email servers meant the loss of all her emails, contacts and bookings for the Cafe she owned.
Now, I’m not generally a mean person. Although, I just couldn’t help but laugh. I find it hard to have sympathy for someone in that situation. It also reinforced the reason I run a desktop email client, which stored all my contacts, email and calendar on my local computer. Which in turn I backup regularly.
Even though I have a Gmail account, No where in the Google terms and conditions does it state they guarantee the data will be there forever, and I doubt Orcon or any other ISP that offers webmail can guarantee your data will always be accessible. Hence why I all my email, contacts, calendar are stored in Microsoft® Outlook. My Outlook data file is then backed up regularly which means if anything happens to my computer, I can easily retain my own data and restore it onto a new computer if need be.
This event should be a wake up call to all who use such services that unless you’re in complete control of your own data, it could be lost very easily. This is especially important if you rely on such data for business. Maybe I do have an advantage of knowing what I am doing, coming from an I.T background.
Yes, technology can and will fail on us, but you just can’t rely on a third party to keep your information secure, let alone a current backup of your data in case of such an incident. As Orcon has proven, even though they apparently backup data, that backup is also gone which means everything is lost for good.
If those people were in control of their own data locally, this would not have been the case.
Take control of your data back. Don’t rely on a third party, who in most cases will not guarantee it will always be available to you. If you can not afford to loose it tomorrow, back it up today.
Good post, and I think you are right, people need to take control of their data, time and time again people are moaning about how they lost some important thing on the computer, due to a hard drive failing, a power spike frying it etc.
People don’t realise that things fail, things blow up, and sometimes big companies, ones that apparently store stuff forever have problems, or just delete stuff because they can.
I’m pretty good at backing up all my important stuff, I learned the hard way after a hard drive failure, but was glad I had it when my desktop computer got stolen recently.
I’ve tried explaining back ups to people, but they don’t really get it.