Computer craSH

Photo by THE 9TH Coworking on Unsplash

I was hours away from my computer crashing. This is not the blog I had planned, but it underscores the importance of infrastructure and processes for solopreneurs. These are the under-the-desk parts of running a business, because without them our desk would have no legs.

My computer was 7 years and 3 months old. I had planned on replacing it in July. Two years ago a line of pixels on the screen had failed, creating a thin red stripe along the left margin. More worrisome, this past summer, is that I could hear the fans revving at the end of the day. More than this, operations had begun slowing down randomly and then more consistently during the past few months.

I was doing more than watching my little boat spring leaks over the past 2 years. I began backing up key files daily in addition to the weekly backups of all data files.

Never lag in backups more than you are willing to lose.

I also have security hygiene processes. I subscribed to a reputable purveyor of security and disk management software. Security apps I set to run in the background. Management apps, I run offline at the end of week before initiating the weekly backup.

Far less time is spent avoiding malware than is recovering from malware.