Residential Burglary Shatters Family's Christmas, and Future
Stolen Laptop, Hard Drive, Contained Victim's PhD Disserataion
Last Friday (December 17), it seems that someone kicked in the front door of Jessica Osuna's home in the Northeast Heights section of Albuquerque and made off with everything of value that he/she/they could carry. According to Ms. Osuna, the the thief and/or thieves can keep everything that they stole with the exception of two items: her Apple McBook Pro laptop and the attached 1Tb LaCie external hard drive. In fact, she would probably help the scumbags carry everything from her home if they were to return her Mac and the drive. For her, and her family, those two items represent not only years of hard work but their future as well.
You see, Ms. Osuna is (or now, "was") within weeks of earning her PhD. She even had a job offer that was contingent upon her completing her doctorate. All that is/was left to do was to print and submit her doctoral dissertation, and the rest was a mere formality. All of that is now in jeopardy because her PhD dissertation, and years of meticulous research that went into it, were on the laptop and hard drive that were stolen. Sadly, she had no duplicate or backup copy of her research. Five years of her life was carried off by someone who probably can't spell "Doctor of Philosophy."
Having worked toward a postgraduate degree myself, your humble correspondent knows what it's like to sit around some musty old room filled with even mustier old documents and records that are so obscure only a historian could appreciate their contents. With that said, let me offer a little advice that may prevent such a life-shattering event in someone else's future.
For God's (or some other equally important figure's) sake, back up your data and keep that backup file somewhere that is very inconvenient for anyone other than (and possibly including) yourself to get at! And how are you supposed to do that?
For starters, according to industry trade group OnlineStorage.org there are any number of online data storage services that can tailor their services to meet your particular needs for as little as $4.99 per month. Additionally, your Internet Service Provider may offer some amount of data service as a part of your service agreement. If you want to find out, drop them an e-mail! And here's a tip that very few will have considered.
Google Mail, as part of it's standard e-mail service, gives you up to 7 Gb of online e-mail storage. What's to prevent you from mailing your critical data to yourself? All it takes is a second e-mail account (which is free from Yahoo and HotMail, among other) and you're ready to go! But the easiest ay to protect your data, by far, is to make a backup file yourself using an inexpensive USB Flash drive.
As you might imagine a quick Google search for "USB Flash Drive / External hard Drive" turned up pages after pages of links to the web sites of both online and retail stores that routinely carry external Flash drives, ranging from "low-end" 8 Gb USB sticks (Amazon.com: $6.95 to $19.95, Staples: $10.99 to $29.95 , and Walmart: $9.95 to $19.95) all the way to "high-end," 2 Tb ("2 trillion bytes," for the technology clueless) external hard drives (Amazon.com: $78.99 to $189.99, Costco: $129.99 to $199.00).
Don't let what happened to Jessica Osuna happen to you. There's still time for you to save yourself, and your family, a lot of unnecessary grief.
Published by Wayne McDonald
I'm a retired Physician's Assistant with special qualifications in adult & pediatric echocardiography (heart ultrasound) and cardiovascular testing. I'm also working on my master's degree in history. View profile
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5 Comments
Post a CommentOh, and I had made many changes the same morning before I left to run a few errands. I wanted to read them with a fresh mind after returning home before emailing them to my advisor (and thus having a copy in my gmail). Also, they stole the thumbdrives that had copies of my Matlab files and Sigmaplot graphs. But yes, I should have e-mailed the actual data to myself instead of just manuscripts and graphs. Like I said, I never thought that a burglary could or would happen to me and whenever I started to investigate online backup options, I convinced myself that I was just procrastinating and should focus on finish writing and worry about that later. I also was under the impression that safes were safe. Sorry to be commenting so much, but I obviously just can't stop thinking about it.
I just want to clarify...this is Jessica Osuna, the victim of the story. I have 2 kids and am 50% of the family income. Living as a grad-student means prioritizing expenses and not everything makes the cut (rent, reliable childcare, and healthy well-rounded meals always win). Because I was working from home (not carting a laptop around town, or leaving it sit in an empty campus office), online backup services didn't make the cut. It was planned in the budget as soon as I started my new job and the threat of theft was perceived to increase. My external hard drive was rotated between my safe and my computer and a smaller hard drive was connected and running Time Machine while the 1TB one was in the safe. I thought I had done a reasonably good job of backing up considering our budget limitations and what I perceived were the real risks (fire, computer failure, and 2 small children in the house). The thieves, however, opened our safe like it were a shoebox and made off with all ba
Agrees on all counts. With the development of Web 2.0 and the shift to electronic self-publishing, it makes one ask 'how many literary pearls are hidden within the herds of swine.'
Re-reading my comment, I should clarify that I am not implying that Douglas Adams wrote "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" (Ayn Rand).
Sad story, and great advice. I remember thinking to myself whern Douglas Adams passed away and they posthumously published the "Salmon of Doubt" because they discovered it in one place, on the hard drive of his Mac. Had that drive crashed, the world would never have known what they missed.
Not that "The Salmon of Doubt" was an earth changing item, but suppose we'd never seen "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountain Head" due to such an oversight? The world might be very different, and the conservative movement might be much smaller.
I back all my data up to various locations, including off-site, and keep hard copies of my best work. Don't want to miss an opportunity to change the world. Too bad I can't back up my ego, but they don't make hard drives big enough for that yet.