So, after a few crazy weeks, we’re finally back up and running on our Tech Tuesday blog series.  This week’s Tech Tuesday isn’t about a website or an app or anything of the sort.  It’s more of a personal blog post, sharing a warning and some advice.  We hope you enjoy it.

As many of you may know, our library was hit by a computer virus.  This virus got onto our server and encrypted it, rendering it useless.  Our files were gone.  Poof.  Completely unusable.

But hey, we have an IT company and they handle our backups, so we were saved!  …right?  Wrong.  Our staff files returned, thanks to Carbonite.  However, our main system files were gone.  The system wrote its files to a hidden folder by default, and hidden folders are something Carbonite does not seek out and back up.  So in the seven years we’ve been using this system, never once was a backup created.

So we shut our doors for a week and a half to being the process of rebuilding.  Here we are almost a month later and we are still working on finishing the process. It has been a long process and a learning experience.

Our advice to you, back up everything!!  Be sure everything is being backed up.  Back up in multiple locations.  Back up frequently.  Create a back up of your back up.  Some things you cannot recreate.  We were fortunate that, while it’s a tedious task, we can recreate our files.  However, those pictures of your kids/grandkids/puppy/vacation/ you name it cannot be recreated.  Back those files up!  Use sites like Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft One Note, or any of the other free online file storage sites. Get an external hard drive and back up files there.  Do both!  Seriously, do both.  Hard drives fail, computers fail, online servers can fail.  Keep your files safe.