A Cloud Dufus

Don't you hate people who don't practice what they preach? Well then, steer your anger towards me, for I am a hypocrite. I not only preach about the cloud, I wrote a huge feature about data and file synchronization. I exposed the best tools and advocated that we all have an active role in the replica of our files, not just for backup, but for access from any device anywhere. Pretty good idea and pretty good advice.

So what did this nincompoop do? It all started yesterday evening when my son was taking Tae Kwon Do and I was finishing and article on deadline. I fired up my Dell Latitude and was hit with security alerts and what looked like a virus scan which launched and ran on its own.

This wasn't my virus scanner. I knew I was in trouble. Task Manager couldn't shut it down -- in fact I've never seen so many unrecognizable tasks running at one time. Microsoft Security Essentials was hosed as well.

So now I am using my daughter's old college HP laptop (with a missing 'i' key). That feature will have to wait -- I didn't have a backup. Doh! My Maxtor external drive has plenty of space, but the backup is hopelessly out of date. That's because I use Carbonite to back up files. The problem is I have a new machine and was too lazy to reactivate Carbonite.

I guess admitting my flaws, even something as simple as activating a cloud backup system which takes about two minutes, is a lesson for many of us. Cloud storage and backups are great, but they don't run themselves. They need to be set up right and monitored.

Posted by Doug Barney on 12/07/2010 at 12:47 PM