Do you back up your data?

How would the loss of a laptop computer affect you?

I found out last week - we had thieves break in and steal my laptop and digital camera.

Fortunately we had copied the photos off the night before, but the backup of the laptop was not recent.

I had copies of most of my files, but emails, and stuff downloaded from the 'net were gone.

gmail helps - I use that for most of my emails now, but it is a pain to have to go scouring for all the cool stuff one trips over and negligently forgets to bookmark.

So I'm going to do some thinking and propose to present a paper at the Australian System Administration Conference in July this year on data protection for the technically deficient. I'm not a geek - while I have more than a handful of computers at home, none are rack-mounted or running RAID, and for those not acting as workstations for the wife and kids the most powerful is a Celeron 700.

 

Oh - I'm not talking about confidentiality of data - that is a separate issue, but for LCP (that's Life Continuity Planning) there is definitely a need to rethink the way most of us store our data so that our enjoyment of "information electronic" doesn't suffer too much when the bastards* of the world upset our apple carts.

 

*There is no justification for breaking in to someone's home and stealing stuff - especially stuff that can't be replaced. The pain of having a saucepan stolen is not as great as that of having a photo album taken. You can still eat out - or order pizza. You can't go back in time and take the photos again.