Off and On

Well, it seems we have week 3 of disasters this time with the failures at Heathrow. It really resonates with what I mentioned in my post on WAVE Media on Wednesday. There should always be a backup. Be that a plan, another resource, a saved copy of your stuff in case the worst happens.

I can’t say I’m perfect at keeping things safe and backed up, but where I can I make the effort. My camera photos are saved to an SD card and backed up to Dropbox and subsequently my laptop. So are my WhatsApp messages to Google Drive. Many of my work files are backed up automatically by our IT Department as a blanket “Snapshot” of each NAS drive (personal documents, personal desktop, corporate share) every hour and kept for up to 3 days. Even this website and it’s sister sites are backed up a couple of times a day and I try to ensure if I’m at home or out and about I’ve got a couple of sources of internet available in case one fails and another phone in reach if mine goes out of signal/range and I need to contact someone.

When it comes to non digital stuff, I try to keep a plan for things too. Like pulling in resources over the weekend after the cyber attack happened to ensure the centres would be able to be up and running at work – which thankfully weren’t needed with our IT Department enacting their own.

Things in this world do sometimes go wrong and so long as you have a plan and you know how to get up and running again as soon as possible and if not at all, what you can do in the meantime, things can usually get back to business pretty quickly. In BA’s case, a backup supply would have really helped. Would it be possible? Who knows until more facts come in. Here’s hoping next weekend won’t fail us.

Take care everyone,

Mike


Cash? Or Check?

So, this was a busy week!

A potential move forward on my flat refurbishment (that didn’t happen) after 2 weeks of nothing, a move around of offices and a large scale cyber attack that’s left my local hospitals/places of work in a rather awful state. No rest for the wicked eh? Or is there?

I can’t pretend the NHS was the only place affected by the attacks of Friday, quite far from it actually. But it’s taught us a rather important lesson in security, backups and keeping things up to date.

It’s easier said than done and I’m pretty guilty of forgetting to back things up myself which thanks to the wonders of automation I have less of a worry over.

The thing that bugs me is not only the anonymity of the attack (which I suppose is a given with the vast array of hackers and malicious software writers out there) but also the lack of motive. Considering this was on such an unprecedented scale and given the timing in world events, somebody must be pretty bored or with a sick sadistic mind to think that launching this is okay (and considering they earned more in a day for pressing a button than I do in a year for working hard, somebody pretty greedy too).

My heart goes out to all those affected by the incident and whom now have to work over the weekend through days and nights to fix things and patch up before the potential second attack that security experts think may happen tomorrow.

Take care out there guys and let’s see if the Internet is still alive next week (provided all the servers holding it up are still running).

 

Mike