Yellow Crayon interviewed on radio

Today, while attending the ITEC conference at the Portland Convention Center, Tony Marino of America Webworks interviewed me (as Chief Honcho at Yellow Crayon Computer Services) for KBNP Radio, AM 1410. Tony and I have known each other for years... we met at the Tigard Chamber of Commerce! Thanks, Tony, it was fun!

Internet Backups And File Sharing

Worried about losing the data on your computer? You could save your data onto CD, DVD, or to an external USB device. Another option is to save your data onto a secure internet server. Keeping your backups off-site protects you from theft, fire, and equipment failure. Internet backup servicesprovide software that will automatically back up your essential files, mail messages, etc. so you don't have to manually fiddle with CD's, DVD's, or USB storage. Making our lives simpler and saving us time: Isn't that what computers are supposed to do?

There's another class of internet file storage where you upload (save) files yourself. This type of service is more appropriate for data that you want to share with someone else and that doesn't constantly change (since backing it up would be repetitious for you). A sampling of these providers are listed in the second table below.

Follow this link for a sampling of backup service providers and internet storage services.

It pays to do regular backups!

Heather, an office assistant at a local business, called to say that their customer list had become mis-sorted. Could I help them recover it from backups?

Yes. I talked her through the recovery process over the phone. This saved her hours of work vs. manually untangling the customer list. Of course, this wouldn't have worked if we hadn't set up automated backups less than a month before. We used SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks, and set it to back up critical files every night. Heather recovered yesterday's version of the file, and is another happy client!