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Google Grief Counseling

11 July 2008 No Comment

google-docs001You never know loss until you experience it. Data loss, that is. While certainly not as traumatic as other kinds of loss, you feel as if a part of you has disappeared when your hard disk or your computer gives up the ghost. It’s about more than just having to make up work you lost, or pulling things back onto the disk from the backup (you did make one, didn’t you?); it’s like a piece of you – your personality, your very being – disappeared along with your desktop wallpaper. Of course, wallpaper can be replaced. But work you’ve saved – that’s a different story. If you made a backup yesterday, you only lost a few hours of work. But what if – like so many others – you didn’t? According to one survey (http://tinyurl.com/59acx8), two-thirds of computer users back up their data less than once a month – and a third never do. Considering how a dead disk is just a matter of time, you’d think people would take a long-range view of things, like what they would do it they lost important work. So why don’t more people back up more often? Aside from the normal “it’ll never happen to me” feeling, backing up is usually a schlepp – you have to open a program, find space on DVDs or network drives for your data, etc. And whose to say the backup disk won’t die one day, too? What’s needed is a simple, any-idiot-can-do-it backup method, with gobs of unlimited space for your work in a secure space that won’t fail you. And that’s exactly what you get with the Google Documents List Uploader (http://tinyurl.com/3c4mse), another invention from the good Google folks that can save you a lot of grief. If you’ve got a Gmail account, you can use Uploader for free. Once installed, you get a menu bar tray icon that you click on to link to your Google Docs on-line space (which you get with your Gmail account). You can drag files from your Windows desktop into the Uploader window, and they get saved on-line – or just highlight a bunch of files in a folder and right click, selecting the newly installed “Send to Google Docs” option that you now have. Your files are backed up and safe. May we never know data loss again.

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