lost an important usb key? tough.

Every week i get emails from the college telling me how some student has lost their usb key and that it’s really important they get it back as their entire year’s work is on it and they’ve no back up.

photo credit: webchicken

Honestly, i couldn’t care less I don’t care if somebody loses their work and don’t have it backed up – that’s their problem. They took the risk and it backfired. It’s laziness – nothing else. Pure laziness.

IT students in particular have no excuses. Who’s gonna employee an IT guy that can’t even keep his own data secure and backup up – never mind a company’s!

If something is SO important that you cannot afford to lose it, you’ll do everything in your power to secure it and make sure you reduce the risk of losing it. My usb key is like my car keys, phone and wallet – it comes everywhere with me.

If i lose it, i’ll be angry – yes but only because i’ve lost a €60 usb key, not because i’ve lost the data that’s on it. I have all my important stuff kept on my home PC, netbook and ‘in the cloud’ on gmail and other sites.

The single most valuable storage area i have is probably my gmail account. It’s hosted by google, so it’s pretty reliable. But that doesn’t make it bulletproof. I have gmail offline enabled on both my home PC and netbook – meaning the previous 3 months of gmail activity are stored locally on both of my PC’s.

So if gmail were to go down or my account get hacked or shut down for whatever reason, all is not lost. If i lost my home PC, netbook and was locked out of all my online accounts – then i’m in trouble but the chances of that happening are extremely slim if not nil.

The moral of the story is backup here, backup there, backup everywhere 🙂