Time Management - When is the best time to back up your computer?

When is the best time to back up your computer?
…When it’s the right time…
If you can read this blog you either have your own computer or have access to one. In whichever case you are probably aware that computers can have problems of various kinds, resulting data being lost. The kind of data you can use can include contact details of important friends or business contacts, work that you spent hours or weeks preparing, photographs of sentimental value, and even passwords or access information for a myriad of applications and services that you take for granted. Losing even a small amount of data can be a personal and professional disaster. Even if you have backups it can take hours, or even days to restore and get your systems back up and running in the format that you can work with.

So we all KNOW that we need to take regular backups, but many of us put it off, either because we think we are too busy, or perhaps we don't know how to do it properly or we don't understand the boundaries between what our company server and own local hard disk and what each stores and backs up. And when we don't do things we think we SHOULD do we feel bad, guilty and uncomfortable.
For the last year or two I have been using a new computer and diligently trying to back up to an external hard disk. However, each time I try, the disk shows an error message of one kind or another, including that files buried in deep folders are locked. This has meant that for about 18 months I knew I didn't have adequate backups of my files. I rang the company supporting my computer. I made progress but the problem was still unresolved. This was a lurking concern for me but I decided that since I had made my best efforts at that stage, that I had the best intentions and it would be OK. I resolved I would make sure I got adequate backups ‘at the right time’ before any crash. So how did I plan to do this?
I decided to trust my gut feelings about it to make sure that if I got a strong enough sense I needed a backup that I would get it sorted out. Before Christmas I heard that a friend had lost computer and everything on it and saw it as a salient warning.
Finally, finding I had extra time to work at home because of the recent heavy snowfall I rang the computer company again and finally resolved the issue. I took a full complete backup. I was concerned that my email files were not copied so I even exported all of my email files to the external hard drive to capture emails as well as contacts.
It just suddenly felt like the right time and I knew it couldn't wait any longer.
On Sunday without warning when I opened my email client it appeared to be blank, as though like a completely brand new installation. No sign of emails or contacts or calendar entries.

My heart sank. I couldn’t quite believe that all the data and settings had really been lost so I checked and double-checked that it wasn't lurking somewhere in another part of the computer, but no. It was gone. It didn't take very long to reinstall the data, although the settings for incoming email accounts took longer and I needed to set up signatures, fonts and other minor details again. But the main factor was that something had made me take the time to sort out the back up problem. In fact, I didn't lose any emails because the latest were held on the server and I could access them by web-mail.

So we can give ourselves a hard time for not doing many things that we KNOW it is sensible to do regularly, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter when we do these important things, just as long as we do them ‘at the right time’ for us. Of course, to have peace of mind, it is probably better to do these things regularly and systematically. But although it can take practice and learning to calibrate our own internal signals like gut feelings and intuitions, it can be done. Ultimately, we can save time by doing what we need to do when we need to do it, we can also save energy because we are not wasting it feeling bad.

My perspective is that successful time management is partially about getting more out of our time, partially about feeling better about what we actually do and partially recognizing how much you really do achieve, without even realizing it!


Helping you to get more from your time!