Halloween Treats: Ghouls, Goblins And -- Backups!

Maxell has a good, timely suggestion:in addition to traditional Halloween activities (whether allowed in your workplace or not) use Halloween as the day you begin (or re-commmit to) regular backups of your data.Maxell has picked Halloween as the day for this year's Fall Backup campaign, and it's a nice idea.

Citing a Harris/Symantec survey, the storage media company notes that 43 percent of us don't back up anything, at all, ever.

Sounds about right, based on the number of times I've been asked to help people find lost and un-backed data (and the occasions when I've found myself in the same position, to be frank.)

What I like about the Maxell promotion (other than their advice not to re-use storage media for your backups: they are in the business to do business, after all) is the linkage of backup to a calendar event. Halloween's convenient, but it's easy enough to extend the idea to make backups and holidays regular events, like so:

Unstuff that turkey of a computer and back it up!

Unwrap your presents under the tree and then backup your entire directory tree!

Won't you be my Valentine? Only if your data is backed up!

Declare an Day of Independence from un-backed-up data!

You get the idea.

So does Maxell: it's easy to put off, forget or just plain ignore the need to back up your data. By making a holiday or event's arrival the arrival as well of a reminder to do your backups you're one step closer to actually getting them done.