….We interrupt this 90 Day Challenge with breaking news…
Your email service will be upgraded this Monday, October 20, 2008. Yes, that’s right we will be upgrading our current email service to a fully functioning version of Microsoft Exchange.
Our current email system has served us well for many years, but as you may have noticed, we have just outgrown it. Microsoft Exchange is the industry standard for email, contact management and calendar functions. The EWM staff has been using it for a few years and it has been awesome. Exchange will continue to work with your smart phones and will be accessible over the internet as well as on your personal computers that have Outlook or Outlook Exchange.
I will continue to interrupt the Challenge lessons with anything you need to know, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, back to our regularly scheduled programming. All about Back up Devices.
From saving a contract to take with you on the road to backing up your entire computer for safekeeping, everyone has a need for back up. Here are a few suggestions for you to consider.
Flash Drives – a great solution when you need something small, cheap and portable. Flash drives can be put on a keychain or dropped into your pocket. Although you can buy flash drives that hold up to 64 Gigabytes (basically that will back up my entire laptop computer) any 16 GB drive will hold all of your pictures, contracts and scanned files for quite a while. 4 GB drives start from as low as $10. See more choices online at Amazon.
External Hard Drives – a great solution for backing up your entire computer. Have you ever had the hard drive in your computer crash and all of your information is lost? It is not pretty and is oh so avoidable. Plug in that back up drive and never worry about it again! Hurricane coming? No problem – take that drive with you to your safe place and you will be able to plug in anywhere and get started again. You can also use an external hard drive to store your pictures, music and other large files so that they don’t clog up your hard drive. Check the size of the hard drive in your computer and make sure the drive is at least twice the size of the drive. You can now buy drives by the Terrabyte (1000 GB). Since the drives are plug and play, you can use one drive to back up more that one computer. Also worth noting are the new wireless drives where you are able to back up through your wireless network without having to plug anything in. I just upgraded to the Apple Time Capsule and it is amazing! Shop Amazon here for ideas and prices.
Online Backup Storage – The latest craze in back up devices is to back up to what is termed “cloud” storage on the net. The advantages here are flexibility and accessibility. You only pay for the space you use. Since you are actually backing up to a space accessed through the internet, you will be able to retrieve files from any computer anywhere. Curious? iDrive offers a free 2GB trial.
Your homework: Learn to use the back up drive. Your current email box may not fully port over to the new system, so there is no time like the present. If you currently use Outlook on your personal computer, the video below will show you how to archive your mailbox to your hard drive or you can use anyone of the above storage options. Good luck and don’t get caught without a backup.
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