Would you let him live?

[The Captain]

In my case it's the Quicken, Excel, Word, and Tax Program files that would need to be backed up the most.  I also use Powerpoint and a few other programs on occasion. 

Quicken is especially precious since I have over 14 years of detail financial information in there.

[The Captain]

Nov 19, 2014 16:34:50 GMT -5 Abby Normal said:

Nov 19, 2014 16:07:21 GMT -5 The Captain said:

Sound like you know more about computers than I do.  Is it pretty easy?  Can I do our whole network or would I only be able to do my laptop.  If I run the backup to an external HD can I have redundant/generational backups on the same drive?  Then again HD's are crazy cheap so I'd have no problem buying 2-3 of them (or do you still partition really big ones?).

I'm not thrilled that I may have to take this on myself, but will do so if it's pretty idiot proof.  DH's gets nuts when I start messing with the network/computer stuff but he's brought this on himself.

Better than the average bear as our IT guy often says.  The Ghost is pretty easy.  I don't know if it can do a network since I've never done it that way.  But you could definitely do your laptop.  

The external hard drive is just a very large jump drive.  I use for our music, and pictures as well as a back up for our files.  I just save a copy there occasionally.  But you should be able to do a back up through your Quicken and save it to the ehd.  That is more of a manual process but it's something you could do rather than expecting your DH to do it.

DH does the computer crap in our house to (and just like you I do the financial side). But I still back up my own files because it's me that is going to suffer if it goes down. 

Truer words were never spoken!  Thanks for the tips, I'll look into it.

[msventoux]

I have all of my stuff in QuickBooks.  I had a hard drive failure a few years ago and lost over a years worth of data since I hadn't done backups.  Now I have a folder on my hard drive of important stuff and upload it to Evernote every month.  At least once a year I back up everything onto an external drive and then take the drive to store in my safe deposit box.  It's probably a bit overkill, but I have a list of instructions in there along with account numbers and instructions on what's on the drive and why it might be important.  If I die in a house fire or something, my beneficiaries should have a relatively easy time accessing any of my financial data that they might need.

[Bonny]

Just got to this thread and I feel your pain! BTDT TWICE.

First time laptop got stolen when we had just moved to Germany. Hadn't gotten around to figuring out a back up protocol. Lost all our financial data for the year in October.

Second time was while we were in transit back to the US, staying at the cabin and the cat knocked over my glass of wine into my laptop which DH thereafter dubbed "The Winetop". Fortunately that was only in July and therefore I only had to manually input 7 months of data.

DH is a computer geek too. He has now set up an external back up which automatically updates every Saturday.

The memory of having to input all that data for the five rentals PLUS tax info for two states and two countries makes me want to drink multiple cocktails to blot out the pain.

Happy Friday!