You know, there’s a saying among bikers; there are those who have crashed and those waiting to crash. Having ridden for ten years myself, I know this is a fact. One uncharacteristically snowy February morning in Las Vegas I ignored my inner voice and headed out to work on the bike. Driving along on that overcast, chilly morning I noticed some of the cars alongside me had snow on their roof. I thought to myself, “Oh, they must have come from Mt. Charleston. No biggie.”
Problem was, those cars were coming from the east and Mt. Charleston was in the west.
Duh.
Well, I got to the strip of open road by McCarran airport and the bike started fishtailing. Lovely. In my head I knew this was it. I had hit a patch of black ice and there was no saving what was about to happen next. Like Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club, I listened to that internal penguin and just slid. The bike went down in the middle of rush hour traffic a couple blocks from the Las Vegas Strip. Let me tell you, leathers and total surrender are very good things.
Owning a computer is very much like owning a bike. Okay, maybe not as life-threatening, but sooner or later, it’s going to crash. You’ll have a power surge, you’ll blow a motherboard, you’ll get a devastating virus, your cat will knock over a cup of water on it, you’ll drop it, you’ll lose it…you get the idea.
But…also like owning a bike, there are precautions you can put into place to prepare for just such an emergency. Times like this it’s good to be a boyscout and Be Prepared. This takes a little elbow grease, a lot of forethought, diligence and sometimes, a bit of money.
Now, there are as many ways to back up your information and keep it safe as there are stars in the sky. I’m going to share with you what I do for myself personally, and what Wendi and I do as a business. There’s nothing worse than losing all your personal files, such as photos that you’ll never be able to replace, or files you use to run your business and care for clients.
Deb’s Top 5 Tips For Surviving A Computer Disaster
External Hard Drives. After my first computer went kaput six years ago, it was due to a failure in the hard drive. Luckily, Geek Squad worked their magic and were able to do a full data recovery for me. Can I say how much I love those guys?
Since then, I’ve had a Seagate external hard drive with Memeo automatic backup. It’s a no-brainer. You set the Memeo program to automatically update the folders you choose and away it goes. Each time you add something to that folder, or edit a file, the backup saves it to the little hard drive. Not only is this good for saving your files, but if you work with two computers like I do, or travel a lot, the portable hard drive can go with you anywhere. You’ll always have your files right at your fingertips wherever you are.
Software. In my line of work, I use a plethora of programs. Some are mainstream, but others like my font viewer, or Alien Skin plugins for Photoshop, or video capture software and audio and video converters, are numerous and hard to remember where you got them from. You’re also going to have registration codes to go with all of those. Who can remember all that? I can barely remember all the passwords we have for everything let alone what the registration code was for my favorite plugin was that I purchased over a year ago!
The solution? Create an “Install” folder on your comp. Each time you download an .exe file (the file that installs the program on your computer) save it in that file along with a Word.doc with the registration code in it. This way when you have to reconfigure your new computer, you have all that info available. Also create a label in your email for “Receipts”. Keep the confirmation info sent to you each time you purchase a new program. Backup is all about saving as much as you can in multiple places. For a while it may seem like moving into a new house and living out of boxes, but eventually you’ll get everything set up just like it was before.
Fonts and Graphics. Not everyone has as extensive font library as I do. I’m a designer. It’s my job. Some women collect shoes, I collect fonts. System fonts (the ones that come with the computer) are fine, but when you design for a living, you download a lot of special ones. I have a folder on my computer called “Graphics Library”. This is where I store a copy of every font I download, along with my iStock images and various documentation I’ve accumulated over the years. Losing all of that would be a very bad thing.
Browser Info. I had my roommate laughing tonight when I said “Internet Explorer…the best browser for downloading Firefox.” It’s true. The very first thing I do on a new computer is download Firefox. Now, I’m not the type to even TRY to memorize ever single password I use to everyplace I go on the web. I let Firefox do that for me (and Safari and Chrome…and yes, IE. I need all of them to cross check how new websites look after they’re done).
In Firefox, you can create profiles. These profiles store all your browser settings, your bookmarks, your passwords and so on.
First, go here to create a backup of your Firefox profile. Later on, should you need to move it to a new computer, use these instructions.
Adobe, Gdocs And A Whole Virtual Sky Full Of Clouds. Ahhh…clouds. I’m not talking about the light, fluffy beauties we see floating around on a tranquil spring day. These clouds are virtual storage. Not too long ago, Wendi and I finally got our butts in gear and subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud. This subscription enabled us to each get the full Creative Suite 6 (CS6) on all of our computers, plus storage space either of us can access with all our client project files. We also share documents on Google Drive. In fact, we wrote all four of our novels on GDrive. All of our notes, rough drafts, Blue Sun projects and ideas, client files and such are on there. It’s a beautiful thing.
That’s about all I can think of right now. It’s my system and it works for me. Right now I’m typing out this post while CS6 quietly downloads and installs all the programs I use on a daily basis. I have a few more I need to install that were the extras I found over the years. I have my Graphics Library that Geek Squad so smartly transferred from the old hard drive and I have a spiffy new HP Pavillion. I’m happy. Life is good. And I bet that if I didn’t write this post, none of our clients would have known we suffered a potentially devastating crash.
Speaking of crashes…that bike story I started? I walked away from it. As I stood over my fallen bike in the middle of morning rush hour, with at least a dozen men staring at me through their windshields, it was a woman who got out of her car, asked me if I was alright and helped me get the bike up and off the road. She was a biker too, a member of the Harley Owners Group. I was riding a Yamaha VStar at the time.
I wheeled that bike into the nearest parking lot and stood there in the drizzle. Pete had doubled back by that point after someone at the next stop light told him his riding partner went down. I was laughing when he pulled up. Not a funny, amused laugh. More like “I can’t believe what just happened.” Both me and the bike didn’t have a scratch on us…alright, maybe the bike did, a very small one on the bottom of a new exhaust pipe I had installed the weekend before. Yay for crash bars.
Because I had taken precautions (a motorcycle riders’ course and wearing the proper gear) I knew exactly what to do and how to handle the situation. Do the same for your computer. It’s only a matter of time before you crash. Be prepared.