“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
It’s a rainy Monday morning… You wake up bleary-eyed and grab a coffee. You open your laptop to print out an important document to take to the solicitor and are faced with a blank screen.
show moreAfter several restart attempts, you remember that you might have downloaded the document onto your iPad but, in your haste, you drop it on the floor and the screen shatters.
You grab your phone and your keys, then rush out the door to get to the office before your appointment starts but, as you cross the road, your phone slips from your hand – landing in a puddle. It’s completely submerged and the screen goes blank. What happens next? How quickly can you get back up and running?
The first time I worked on a computer was in the 1980s. Back then, computers were big galumphing things with no images. You had to use basic code to instruct them to do anything. Data was sent down telephone lines – taking days and nights for tiny amounts to be transferred from place to place. By the end of the 1980s, however, Tim Berners-Lee had invented the Internet – enabling data to be transferred in milliseconds. Love it or hate it, technology in all its guises is now an integral and growing part of our lives.
When people think of technology, they often immediately picture gadgets… Phones, laptops, gaming consoles etc. But, as Mr Berners-Lee accurately says in his quote, it is our data that is the real jewel. If you have set up your technology correctly, it doesn’t matter if you drop your iPhone in the sea. All you need to do is buy a new one and log back into your Apple account to get back up and running.
If you don’t have your technology set up correctly, however, then you are in danger of losing precious photos, contacts and messages. Furthermore, if you don’t have your security set up across all the apps you use, you are in danger of becoming vulnerable to scams and identity theft.
The biggest source of frustration is often those ‘computer says no!’ situations… Those times when your gadgets simply refuse to ‘play ball’. I’ll bet that you recognise many of the following scenarios:
- Being unable to find documents or share photos
- Having thousands of emails (many of which are marketing ones from sites you have looked at or bought from, but are no longer wanted)
- Not knowing if your social media sites are safely set up
- Not trusting online banking
- Having endless passwords and pins, as well as security checks, double-checks and triple-checks
Is it any wonder you lose the will to live?! All these hurdles feed into your frustration and fears. You end up tiptoeing around technology – asking your children or grandchildren for help. This only adds to the confusion when they set up things that you don’t understand.
Wouldn’t it be nicer instead to have an overall idea of how your technology worked and where your data is stored? If your passwords were easy to save and refer to and, if when things went wrong, you knew where you could turn to for help? Most importantly, if the worst should happen, your family could retrieve crucial information and download precious photos and videos?
I call these ‘just in case’ scenarios – situations where, with a little planning, you can get one step ahead. This can include using apps for booking holidays, flights, cabs, food, concerts and transferring money across accounts – all of which can get you ahead of the curve.
Justin Case can show you how to organise your technology so, instead of it being a hinderance, it can start to benefit you every day, as well as how to secure your precious data for you and your family.
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