Computers: How well can we function without them?
July 18th, 2009Below is the Editorial column from the weekly Boothbay Register of July 16, 2009.
The reason I post it here is that it brings home the point that I make here - repeatedly: We all need to ensure that we have a good backup plan for our own personal computers. This includes maintaining backup copies of all of our pictures, music, text documents, spreadsheets, business files, favorites/bookmarks, e-mail, and so on.
All too often I am called by a customer to help them after they have lost some or all of their precious data. I think the easiest way to do this is to purchase an external hard drive, the larger the better. These, like Western Digital’s MyBook, attach simply via a spare USB port. They need not be online all the time; only when you want to make a backup or access backed-up data.
Amazon, and probably others, currently has a sale on the 1TB, that’s one terabyte or 1000 billion characters of storage for $119. That is a good buy for a good product. It is what I use. It is large enough to satisfy my backup storage needs for a long time.
So make yourself a plan to backup your data regularly and look around for a device you can use to do that. Here is the editorial:
COMPUTERS: How well can we function without them?
We don’t know about you, but we find the world’s heavy dependence upon computers a bit disconcerting. Granted, that’s probably because we were trained in the old school. You know, the one with manual typewriters, and reading, ’riting and ’rithmatic done the old-fashioned way without benefit of a calculator. You were expected to know that 8 times 8 was 64, even if there was no calculator around to tell you, and to figure how many times 7 would go into 100 without pushing buttons to find the answer.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate the tremendous convenience that the modern-day world offers, it’s just that we get nervous when we see what happens if a computer-dependent system fails. Nearly every business in America feels the impact. Food markets and department stores come to a standstill. Gasoline pumps are out of commission.
What concerns us the most is not so much the inconvenience which results, so much as the potential for serious consequences. Case in point: the Web site attacks of last week which impacted many of our government offices. It’s frightening to think about our nation’s dependency upon computers, and how well we could function (or not!) if they failed. Our ships, planes, and other means of defense rely on computers for nearly everything, and, while last week’s cyber-assault didn’t hurt national security directly (or so they say), just think about what it could have done! We don’t have a corner on the market when it comes to computer skills; our enemies have them, too.
Knowing how ill-prepared most folks seem to be when their computers go on the blink, we can’t help but wonder how our national security system would work if we had to go back to the defense methods before the computer age.
It would be interesting to experiment a bit, wouldn’t it, just to better prepare ourselves. In our own office, we used to joke when our computer system went on the blink, or the power failed. After all, our manual typewriter still worked. Unfortunately, technology has come too far, and, like most other places, we’d find ourselves behind the eight ball.
Think about it in your own situation. What’s your own back-up plan? Even more important, how well can our nation (and many others, as well) fare if their computer systems fail? Like we said, it’s enough to make us more than a little bit nervous.
Mary Brewer
