THEN: OUT OF TAPE
NOW: OUT OF POWER
The other day I was in the grocery store with a good friend of mine when the power went out. The lights flickered. Off. On. Off. And then an eerie silence descended on the place. No swiping of debit cards. No beeping of bar codes. No pinging of pin numbers. There we were, with our cart full of important things such as banana cream puffs and wine, with no way of paying for these precious goods.
You see, without power, the cashier could not read the barcodes. Without the bar codes the totals couldn’t be calculated. And without a total, we couldn’t pay. No computers. No business. No good.
My friend offered to pay with a check, for certainly, they would take our money. But it appears the art of manually adding up numbers has gone the way of the dinosaur.
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Back in the day, the biggest problem would be when the cashier ran out of tape and you had to wait while she figured out how to put in a new one. That could take several minutes during which you might have tapped your foot, rubbed your arm, complained to the person in line behind you. But eventually the cashier would get it threaded and she’d be “back in business.”
“Back in business” doesn’t happen as fast when it involves computers. Special techie people have to be called in. The problem can be solved in a few minutes – or not. Sometimes it can take hours. Hours during which time the world seems to come to a halt. Most often the data is retrieved, but once in a while, well, it’s just lost forever.
When I kept papers in a paper file folder inside a real desk and not on a desktop, it might have taken a few minutes longer to find things, but they never completely disappeared.
Just imagine if the Internet shut down for even a few seconds. It would be a Withdrawal of Pandemic proportions.
But back to the grocery store. If you’re wondering, the power outage was an isolated situation and not related to any of our crazy weather situations. We found another store, loaded up our groceries, paid and went home. Where we proceeded to drink wine and back up all those really important files (and some not so important ones) on our computer to our memory chips.
Just in case.
What about you? How obsessive are you when it comes to backing up your files?
I don’t back them up nearly as often as I should. I do it mainly after I’ve lost a few pages of work. Then I get fanatic about it — for a couple days. It’s a good idea to keep a flash drive handy for back-up. I use it for my writing, and also try to save family pictures in a variety of places. But even flash drives have been known to fail.
One method of back-up I’ve used is to email myself something, an attachment of a chapter, or some photos. Can also save photos on Facebook, and Flickr.
Interesting topic…one we can ALL feel for having lived through the experience. Thanks!
As a consultant, I’ve made lots of money telling people to back up their files, and attempting to recover them when they didn’t. Most people don’t do regular backups until they’ve gone through the hell of trying to reconstruct their financial information or rewriting their WIP or chasing down emails they’ve forgotten. Even then they don’t always learn – I’ve fixed things for some people twice.
If course, that doesn’t mean I do it. *smiles* But I work in three different areas (home, apartment wherever I’m working, and day job itself) so I am constantly migrating files, either via email or flash keys. And I back up client stuff to CD/DVD when I’m through with a project.
For those of you who aren’t blessed (cursed?) with redundant systems, there are on-line products that make it pretty painless to back up your stuff somewhere else.
Deb – I email myself a lot, too.
Tom – Thanks for all the helpful advice.