I hadn't worked as a service repair technician in almost five years when I started working for Open 22. Yet within days, one of technical support's cardinal rules (some might say the ONLY rule) became completely apparent:
It's about the data.
This particular rule is actually the third of the Three Basic Rules That Every Computer User Should Follow for a Happy Life. They are:
- Buy a computer that is capable of running the software that I want and need.
- Buy a computer that is capable of running that software as fast as I want it to run.
- Back up the data that using that software produces.
When you analyze computing at its absolute lowest, bare-bones conceptual and functional level, these three simple rules are what using a personal computer is about.
I think we often forget that.
In spite of the glowing LED's, and spinning discs, and processor speeds, and gigs of RAM, we forget that on a conceptual level, a personal computer is actually brutally simple. You buy a computer to run software. Period.
Sure, we also buy them to look sexy or stylish, we buy them for prestige or social status (why else do iMac users fight over which colors they choose?), but ultimately the point is to run software, and to run that software as fast as possible.
And what's the point of running software? To produce something.
Think about it.
A Web browser produces visual text for us to read, ostensibly so we can gain knowledge. A video game produces an interactive world, or pseudo-reality, to entertain and instruct. A word processor produces documents so information can be shared and spread. A digital camera connects to a digital image editing program for the sole purpose of producing pictures, graphics, and logos to be shared.
Ultimately, then, the real value of a computer comes down to what it produces. And the most valuable data on a computer is the stuff we produce ourselves, because there's no other inherent way of producing it.
Are you following me so far?
It's a strangely classical concept that our old friend Karl Marx first espoused--the perceived value of any object increases in direct proportion to the amount of effort we put forth to produce it.
So what does this have to do with computer repair?
It has to do with computer repair because it plays into one of the primary emotions that computer users often feel---fear. They're afraid. Afraid of "doing something" to their computer that will "break it," for one simple reason:
They're afraid that they'll lose time, money, and productivity.
Literally, is there any other reason to fear using a computer? That's it. It's fear of losing time to having to fix the computer, or losing time to replace the stuff we created with that computer.
People fear using the computer because they're absolutely certain that around the next corner, in the next window, there's going to be a button click that will somehow catastrophically destroy their system. And then they'll be stuck wasting hours (sometimes days, or weeks) of their time trying to rebuild the system itself, the data that was lost, or both.
Now, here's a proposition for you---how much of the fear of using a computer is taken away if you take away the ability for the computer to destroy your data? Your hard drive could crash twice a day, and as long as the time investment to get the machine up and running was minimal, and as long as you didn't have to spend precious time recreating data, you wouldn't care.
The real point to all of this, obviously, is this: Back up your data.
That's it. Back up your data.
Back up your data, and 99 percent of the fear of using a computer disappears instantly. When your data is backed up, the worst case scenario of any computer failure is that you're out a few hours and maybe a couple hundred bucks (at worst) to fix it. If your data is backed up, there's zero chance that you'll have to spend hundreds of hours recapturing your digital pictures. You won't have to waste hundreds of hours recreating that digital video project you were almost ready to produce. You won't have to spend hundreds of hours recreating that vital research project.
I have almost zero fear of using my computer, because I keep regular backups of everything I produce. My system could crash RIGHT NOW and sure, I'd be mildly upset, but hardly put out.
The difference between a computer failure being catastrophic and a minor annoyance is how soon before the crash you backed up your data. If you backed up your data yesterday, it's barely a blip on the radar. If you haven't backed up since, well, ever, then you're pretty much up a creek now aren't you?
The moral of this blog post? Have a working, consistent process for backing up your data, even if it's nothing more than copying and pasting it to a thumb drive or external hard drive.
Go do it. Do it now. I guarantee that you will thank me for it later.
--Steve