In many of the Techsplosive articles and product reviews “portability” has been a quality that is frequently cited as a product advantage. On a recent post entitled Technology for the College Lifestyle a commentator brought up two interesting points worth thinking about. jrandom42 said:
With all this portable stuff, this brings up these questions:
1) How do you keep from getting your stuff stolen, lost or misplaced?
2) What do you do when you discover it’s gone and taken your data with it?
Portability is a great feature, but it’s also a great weakness.
To answer the first question, much of this deals with personal responsibility. Taking care of and keeping good track of possessions will no doubt greatly prevent losing, misplacing, or theft. However, no matter how much effort and planning goes into taking care of and keeping track of items, there is always an exception. There is the possibility that your gadgets and electronics could be stolen by force. Thankfully, technology developers are often one step ahead. Most, if not all, newly (within the last few years) manufactured cell phones come equipped with GPS location units. While there is a considerable amount of red tape and/or fees involved, lost or stolen property can be traceable by the GPS unit, provided that it is turned on and not in a deadzone. In addition to coming equipped with GPS locaters, many new computers (namely laptops) can come with special security options such as finger-print or voice recognition security measures, rendering the unit completely worthless to the thief trying to access the information contained on it. While these features may not prevent the theft or loss of devices, they certainly can act as a deterrent.
If you ever do happen to lose an item, or fall subject to thievery, it is not just the device that you will be missing. Along with the hardware, all data and information contained on the gadget is lost with it. The only real solution to data recovery is backing it up. While it may be practical to keep hard copy records of phone numbers or email addresses, it is impractical to keep hard copy records of documents, spreadsheets, and multi-media presentations. In recent years, technology developers have attempted to make data storage more practical and affordable. Because tech developers are finding ways to pack more bytes of info into single molecules on a daily basis, the price of memory and storage is becoming a bit more affordable. A 500GB external hard drive can be purchased for less than $70. From there, just set your computer to back itself up onto the external once a week, and your information loss will be minimal. If that sounds to techie and expensive, then feel free to take advantage of free online tools. Address books and phone number lists can be managed easily from FaceBook. Documents, spreadsheets, and multi-media presentations can be created and saved via GoogleDocs. Both of these services are completely free, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
While jrando42 siad …”portability is a great feature, but it is also a great weakness”, I tend not to agree. Portability is only a weakness when preventative measures have not been taken to insure the safety of devices and information.
Thanks again to jrandom42 for the comments, and I look forward to many more comments in the future that will spark more open discussions like this one. If you like what you have read here at Techsplosive so far, take a second to subscribe to the Techsplosive RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss another great post.
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And then that leaves the problem of finding the time and discipline to back up regularly. It’s an ongoing problem, even for businesses. Far too many people are out doing things with their portable devices and things are not secured properly and not backed up in a timely fashion.
Just look at the continuing flaps about stolen laptops with sensitive corporate or government data.
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