Happy New Year

Many people, thinking about the new year, look at changes that they want to make in their life. Whether it's to lose weight, get involved or spend more time with family, there are many different ways we can improve our lives. Myself, I would like to get to the gym more.

One are where many people could do better is with computer backups. At work, many of us take it for granted that the folks in IT are backing up our computers. At home, however, we are the IT department - and all too many of us are not doing our jobs - not even me (need to convert the digital-8 tapes and get them into the backup process; need to go through the print photos, pull out the important ones and scan them; need to finish labeling the VHS footage).

So here is an opportunity to make a change this year that will give you peace of mind - set up some kind of backup system (including at least one off-site component). I can heartily recommend CrashPlan, which allows backups to local disks, to friends who also have the CrashPlan software and to the CrashPlan data center. It's a reasonably good deal, easy to set up, comes with varying levels of encryption (to protect the privacy of your files) and I can vouch that it works (saved a file that I had accidentally deleted).

There are other companies that offer similar services, so if you like to check out your options before buying, please do check out services like Mozy and BackBlaze, but for goodness sake do something. Every year thousands of homes are destroyed. Don't kid yourself, yours could be next. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

Some Things Can't Be Put Off

I was talking to a friend recently about scanning family photos. My position is that family photos are a physical manifestation of times and events that we want to remember. By scanning pictures into our computers and backing up our computer files, we can preserve those memories indefinitely, share them with friends and family and protect them against loss.

Now my friend is a smart guy, very reasonable and responsible. So imagine my surprise when he told me that he thinks that scanning the pictures would be a good idea but that there are just so many that it would be an impossible job. When I heard his reply, I didn't have an immediate answer for it - I've tackled big jobs before and, at first, they do seem like they will never end.

Then there is this quote:

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
  --  Edmund Burk

To me, there are two important ways in which this statement relates to the problem of scanning a large collection of family photos:

1. As with any long journey that is worthwhile, you have to take it one step at a time. If thinking about the thousands of steps makes you afraid to take the first one then you are well and truly stuck.
2. If you can only do a little, then prioritize. Surely you can find ten pictures whose loss would feel tragic. Scan those today and tomorrow see if you can find ten more. When you've scanned all of the pictures whose loss would be tragic, you can start on those whose loss would merely be extremely sad. In the end, you might find that a significant number of pictures aren't important enough to warrant scanning at all.

We all know that, at any moment, some disaster could happen. Fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes happen. People lose their homes and all of their belongings in these disasters - but you don't have to be one of them.