A colleague had his laptop stolen from work this weekend; he stepped away during an event and came back to find it missing.  He had a backup drive so things should have been fine, but that got taken as well.  A year’s worth of music composition, photos and documents are gone.  But what could he have done differently?  It’s hard to say.  There is no simple answer.

I do know a few things that I’ve started doing:

• I don’t travel with my backup drive.  I leave that at home.  Right now it’s visible but I’m going to make it less so.
• I’m getting a second backup drive.  That’s going someplace else.
• I am organizing my files that I can’t live without and plan to store them online in my Drop Box (learn more)
• I’m looking into laptop anti-theft software.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

I can’t emphasize this enough: If you rely on your computer for your “life” – photos, music, work; Make sure you have a backup plan. You can do everything right and things can still go wrong.

Yes.  But it’s a good idea to back it up anyway.

Like anything else; when I trust my (whatever) to someone else I run the risk that it’ll never come back to me.  The same is true for email; if something happened and my email was lost by google that would be that.  That’s why I have a backup.

The simplest way to have a “back up” is to use Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird or another “Email Client” to access mail.  Not all the time, but if I open Outlook once a day and it goes and gets my mail I then have a copy on my computer in case something happens.

Using web email like gmail, yahoo or hotmail is simple and convenient; using Outlook or Mail once in a while is smart.

• Here’s how to set up gmail with a mail client
• Here’s how to set up yahoo
• If you use another program, ask your network administrator for help