Avoiding disaster

I narrowly avoided a disaster yesterday - maybe it was a power surge from utilities being hooked up. But a little foresight saved the day (it would be nice if government did that).

When I went to work on my laptop it gave an error message - after several attempts to boot up it finally reset itself to the factory start-up -- and deleted over 40 gigabytes of information, documents, pictures etc I had stored on it! YIKES.

But all was not lost - because a couple months ago I subscribed to a $5/month service with "IDrive" which backed up my computer to an online storage nook. Without it, I would have had to start over from scratch.

As it stands, the computer is being restored from the online site - even though it will take two days for all of the information to be transferred. That still beats the alternative.

Moral: Always have a (online) backup! It sure beats the alternative. You never know if your laptop is going to crash, get submerge by a hurricane or get stolen. At least this way, all is not lost even if your computer is.

I recommend everyone, including businesses and government agencies do the same thing.

Foresight does seem to be missing where it's needed. I went to several downtown buildings that had windows blown out during IKE. Two of them, one at 1111 Louisiana next to Centerpoint, and the other at the Wells Fargo building, told me that they had banned hurricane film on their windows. What? Our film with attachment would have kept those windows from blowing out even if they had been broken by flying debris. From a liability standpoint, it is NUTS not to use it.

I was agitated enough that I went to City Hall and voiced my concerns over this short-sighted practice. I'm always amazed when common sense seems to be missing in action. But then common sense seems to be a dying art. We'll see what develops.