Imagine any of the following scenarios:

• You returned to your office this morning to find it had burned to the ground overnight. You cannot salvage anything but a few crispy bits of your pencil sharpener.
• Someone swiped your laptop on the train this morning while you were on your way to work. Nobody seems to have seen the person who did it.
• While working on a brief, you are just putting on the finishing touches when your computer’s hard drive stutters a few times, then dies completely.
• Last night, someone broke into your office and, realizing your clients’ personal information would sell for far more than your computer hardware, rifled through your files, making off with your client information sheets.

Now, ask yourself a few questions.

• Will you ever be able to recover your physical data? Unless it was protected in a fire-proof safe, few attorneys keep spare client files.
• How long will it take to recover your electronic data, and what will you have lost? In other words, how solid is your backup system, and do you have off-site backup?
• How much will it cost to purchase credit-monitoring for all of your past and present clients? If your laptop is stolen and your data is not encrypted, or a thief makes off with part of your paper files it seems only fair.
• How will you (a) prevent, or (b) mitigate the effects of each of these scenarios?

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According to the Star Tribune, detailed personal information for 257 people, including social security numbers, was on a laptop stolen about three weeks ago. The laptop belonged to a vendor, Promissor Corp., who apparently does not observe the basic security precaution of encrypting information on portable computers and drives. I bet that would have been cheaper than paying for credit monitoring for 257 people, especially since excellent encryption software like TrueCrypt is free.

My office was burglarized over the weekend, a valuable reminder of the need to backup and secure your files, both paper and digital.

All the jerks stole was a few rolls of stamps and my video camera. Expensive for me, to be sure, but nothing particularly disturbing. They didn’t touch my external hard drive that I use for backup (and to store movies for lazy Friday afternoons). Apparently stamps are hot items. The building management may have been negligent, and I hope they will buy me a shiny new video camera before my next depositions.

I was irritated, but largely unfazed due to the fact that my files are well-protected and I have multiple backups. I back up my files daily to my external drive, and my laptop comes with me every night. I backup weekly (or so) to a second, portable external hard drive, so I had a backup just a few days old. All my backups are encrypted, so I wasn’t worried about losing client information.

The only paper files in my office are public information like original pleadings. So although I am quite irritated at having to blow a few hundred dollars on a new video camera when the one I had was perfectly good, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

But it is a reminder to back up diligently and make sure your client files are protected, whether paper or digital. You don’t want to have to send a letter to your clients notifying them to look out for identity theft, since you never encrypted your files.

Today I spent two hours drafting a complaint. Tonight, I was getting the complaint ready to go, so I copied my summons form into the complaint document and saved the file without thinking about it. As my finger clicked the mouse button, I realized I had selected “Save,” not “Save as.” Oh shit.

Yes, that’s two hours down the drain. I back up my files every morning to an external drive, but I drafted the complaint this afternoon. I also have an online backup service, Carbonite. Carbonite is great and all, but it also has a tendency to go into “Recover Mode” (i.e., it stops backing up) whenever I put my system in standby, which I did shortly after I finished drafting the complaint. So no backup.

So now I am stuck re-writing my complaint from scratch, and I am extremely angry with myself. Tonight I will probably send an angry note to the makers of Carbonite asking them to (1) give me an option to accelerate the upload, as it is almost too slow to be useful sometimes, and (2) more importantly, to fix the stupid glitch that makes it go into Recover Mode when I put my laptop on standby.

And then, tomorrow morning, I will set up my backups to happen automatically in the morning and in the evening, so that I always have two options. In the meantime, I will painstakingly attempt to reconstruct my complaint while cursing intermittently.