From the DieBrokeBlog Reality Show Files – How IRON100 Saved What Could Have Been A Total Personal Finance Disaster And Made It A Minor Inconvenience

• IRON100
• February 12th, 2010

If I could tell you the story of my technology problems over the last 9 months...oh wait, I have, if you have been following me on Twitter and StockTwits. Well, its not just trading that was affected by my losing my primary data archive drive. I might have also lost all of my passwords, most of my tax documents, many trading spreadsheets, most of my archived trading models (of which there are 1300 if you include stocks, foreign exchange, and futures models. I could also have lost most of my e-mail (and I did lose some, including my recent travel reservations). I have solved most of the major issues with computer technology, partly because the recession has put some savvy computer techs into entrepreneurial mode. But, it still did not immediately resolve all of my problems. How would I recover all of my data records, tax records, and travel information for a flight this weekend?

I did what each and everyone of you should do. I had things backed up, in some cases, in duplicate and triplicate. How did I do that?

Well, I used two different off-site back up services, and they are probably the most popular ones, Carbonite.com and Mozy.com. Each person that I know who has used their services have a favorite, as do I, but I will not go into that because I am not going to do a consumerism segment in this post. I would recommend that you try both of them on a trial basis (because you can under their current offers, and make up your mind). Because I knew the drive was failing, I used the latter service to do a quick backup, as I had some file extension problems with the former service. It could well be that both have flaws, but you should be the judge of that and choose one.

Why should you have off-site backup?

1) Hardware fails. I keep hardware probably for a couple of years too long, and I do all maintenance (including cleaning old files and hard disk defragmentation, several times a week). Still, when a computer gets 3 -5 years on it, the drives will slowly become damaged and ultimately will fail. You need back up other than another piece of on-site hardware that could ALSO fail.

2) The risk of fire damage and theft at home can also be great. Even when I had a back up tape and disk drive (yes, I am old enough to both remember one and to have used one), I would take a copy of the tape or take a removable back up disk and put it in a lock box at a local bank). One simply never knows when something will be burned or stolen, so one better have a back up plan to handle it.

What is the delay if you lose your data? It takes sometimes days to recover the data via download through the web (I have nearly 30GB of critical data, and nearly a terabyte of archived documents). It will take me a little over 70 hrs to download and retrieve the critical archives and re-install them. If you decide with one of the services to get them delivered via DVD, it will cost about $100 and one STILL has to upload them into one's computer, which will still take a lot of time.

Is there another way to survive without immediately needing all the data. There is, and in fact, for my passwords and my tax documents, I stored them onto a stack of CDs that I also stored in the bank lock box. That allowed me to quickly recover any documents I needed to get vital information from bank accounts, trading accounts, and other secure sources. Should you use word processing documents to store them? NO, unless they can be encrypted or password protected themselves. If they can be written on document files, any thief could simply pull them up on a word processing program and simply steal them. A better alternative would be to store them on spreadsheet programs like Excel which has very strong password protection. By the way, my stock screening algorithms were also stored on CDs, and, as I forgot, stored on the NEW COMPUTER. I did that in August just in case I had a disaster like that strike. Well, it DID strike.

How did I recover my lost airline and hotel reservations data? Quite simple really, but it begs another issue of identity theft prevention, and that is the archiving of billing records via ,pdf file which one can also store on CD and put in a remote location. Did you know that if you have the billing record, that the TICKET NUMBER AND AIRLINE of your flight is contained in the billing record of your credit card? It is if you have American Express, and I've no doubt that other credit card companies do the same thing. What that means is that you should store copies of your bills on a ,pdf file  via CD and to destroy your paper billing records. Imagine if you made that flight months in advance and that information were stolen? If the thief also had your personal information, like a social security number, the reservation could be canceled and changed if the thief stole your billing records.

What can one do with the ticket number? One can call the airline for which that ticket number is issued, and one can recover flight  numbers and departure and arrival times. The same goes for hotel reservation confirmation numbers as well.

In future posts I will describe how I keep permanent tax documents and capital gains data, but what I wanted to do today was to demonstrate WHY back-up of all  key documents is important, and how easy it is to do it. I will also provide data as to how one can protect one's identity and why frequent checking of one's credit card statements can also save one time and money is improper charges and fees.

Once again, if one is prepared for disaster, one can avoid it and make it an inconvenience. Planning is key however. If you ain't got a plan, you've tossed your records in the can. (Please do not hire me as your poet laureate ).

Tickers: CD back-up, essential program back-up, flight and hotel reservation recovery, identity theft, off-site hard drive back-up, tax record archiving and recovery

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