A dose of my own medicine
In Information security, Public Relations, Technology PR | 3 comments | permalink
During the course of my technology PR career, I’ve written more than one article on the importance of data backup for businesses and consumers alike. I’ve worked for SunGard Availability Services, a business continuity expert whose clients include some of the largest financial institutions in the world, and currently work for Buffalo Technology whose external hard drives and NAS devices are ideal for backing up data in the home.
Why, oh why then, did I not back up my own laptop? The other day, as I was uploading some photos to my Flickr account, my Dell Latitude, which is less than a year old, crashed. When I tried to reboot it, I was faced with the Blue Screen Of Death - something about a file registry error. I did a bit of research, and worked out that it is caused either because of an incompatibility between the hardware and Windows XP software - or because the hard drive itself is damaged. After half an hour on the phone to Dell’s technical support, I’ve discovered it’s the latter. Whilst a Dell engineer will be coming out later on this week to replace the hard drive under my three-year warranty, he or she will not be able to recover my data. Instead, tech support recommend I contact OnTrack (oh yes, there’s another former client from my LEWIS PR days) whose recovery experts will do their best.
Top marks to Dell for the quality of its technical support team. It used to be lampooned for poor customer service, but my problem was dealt with quickly by a chap in India who knew exactly what he was talking about. If I get my new hard drive on Thursday as promised, I will have no complaints. The potential loss of data is my own silly fault. So here’s a top tip for PR people everywhere: read what you write. Some day it might come in handy!
Jo Jamieson
Interesting comment, and it is good to hear your honesty at your misfortune.
As technology becomes more reliable, so users become more complacement, so when a problem does occur it hits home harder. There is less experience as to how one can recover.
I think I have solved this problem with my BT Broadband package, where everything that is changed on my computer is backed up in a ‘Digital Vault’ every 20 minutes. This could apply to laptops as they will always need to connect to the Internet at some time.
Enjoed your Blog!
Thanks Lloyd - honesty’s always the best policy!
I was definitely guilty of complacency, thinking my laptop would be fine at such a young age. Serves me right…
The BT service sounds good. I’m with Zen, but it’s definitely worth enquiring as to whether they offer something similar. Otherwise, I’m going to be investing in an external hard drive so that I have a copy of all of my data right under my nose.
Thanks for writing this.