A timely warning!

I was shocked to read this http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bt5akp long message from a Google user who has had his account terminated for an alleged but unexplained breach of terms and conditions.

It is claimed that Google hasn't explained or responded in a professional manner to the user concerned, and this should be a heads up to anyone about the danger of relying solely on online services to store their information, whether it be emails, images, documents, videos, or whatever. One word is needed here: BACKUP!

If you have everything stored in Gmail, Yahoo!, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube or anywhere other service you risk losing it if you do not have a copy of it yourself, offline, in a safe and secure location such as a standalone backup drive like the example here http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200792. Such devices are not expensive*, they are simple to set up (plug into your USB port and use), and you can even get free software which will back everything up for you on a schedule of your choice - an example we have used is here: http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp [Note: * Compared to the cost of losing all your data, the hassle of delays, lost work, lost emails, and all the other inconvenience.]

Although these huge online services have apparently good Terms & Conditions, it seems that their implementation is not always carried out in the way which smaller businesses do. These huge businesses have long been abused by spammers and those with less than respectable intentions, and objections to those persons' activities, via an email to the relevant abuse@ address for the service, has normally resulted in reasonably swift termination of problem users' accounts. But times have changed, and rather than simply being a spammers' tool these services have marketed themselves to those users who want to undertake legitimate online activities. By doing so these big services need to change their approach to reports of abuse and not simply press the terminate button, but they need to set up a system of notifications to the account holder advising them of a complaint and allowing the user a reasonable time to investigate and respond to and disprove the allegation. In law, an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty, online it seems that an accused is guilty, full stop. The only way to improve things is for users to raise this issue with the big services and request an alteration in the way they do business. Otherwise nothing will change.

We have a huge sympathy for the person who has lost everything, and we understand how frustrating it must be to not be able to get answers to the questions raised about the account. By sharing this here we hope to help prevent others from suffering the same fate.

World Backup Day

31st March has been designated World Backup Day, which is a useful reminder that if you store data on your computer, you really should safeguard against its loss by backing up to another location.

The big danger is that people might think they should only do a backup once per year! The truth of the matter is that if you have data you do not want to lose, you should back it up every time you make a change!

Simple, sensible backup routines are available to everyone, regardless of ability or equipment. Depending on quantity and frequency, you can back up to an external disk drive, a network drive, a thumb drive, a writeable CD or DVD, or an online backup repository or cloud backup.

Easy to use software can automate the process for you too, so you can set it and forget it. One we like especially is Karen's Replicator from Karen Kenworthy http://www.karenware.com - it's freeware and so easy to set up a child can manage it.

With such easy ways to do it, there's no reason why you should not be backing up daily or weekly. Go try it out and save yourself a lot of hassle if your hard drive fails.