When your hard drive decides to commit suicide, make sure you have backups to survive the ensuing chaos.

Yesterday, another attorney’s hard drive fried itself. He had a backup through Mac OS X Time Machine, and also used some form of cloud storage, but neither backup could give him the last full image backup. Understandably, he went back and forth before ultimately restoring the last captured full hard drive image from Time Machine.

If you are worried about the same scenario, consider cloud storage. A program like Dropbox stores everything on the cloud and on your hard drive. Dropbox updates continuously as long as you have an active internet connection. If your computer crashes, you can restore everything. If the cloud in the sky evaporates, you still have everything on your actual hard drive. Either way, if one source crashes, you still have instant access to everything.

If you do not have a large documents file, consider buying an external hard drive or even a thumb drive. Keep it plugged in all the time, and set it up to backup every ten minutes, or every hour.

You might even consider doing both. When your practice is tied to your computer, you can never be too careful.

Always Be Prepared for Data Loss is a post from: Lawyerist

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.

Lessons learned the hard way: BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP (and make sure your backup system works!) is a post from: Lawyerist