How Much Insurance Do You Have on Your Classes, Sermons, Pictures, and Records?

Trusted advisors told me to insure what I can’t afford to lose. Through the years I’ve had life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, and house insurance.

Soon after I bought my first computer in March 1985, I’ve looked for ways to insure my digital work.

I’ve never regretted backing up too much.

Early in using a computer, I regretted not backing up valuable documents and losing them.

Here are my backup habits:

• I have three external hard drives that I use for my main computer: an iMac. I plug one of my hard drives into a USB port for my Time Machine. On the first day of each month, I unplug the storage disk I’ve been using and take it to our apartment. I replace it with a disk I have in the drawer of my desk that’s been in the “batter’s box” for the past month. The third disk has been in our apartment. I bring it to my study and place it in the “batter’s box” for the first day of the next month. My idea is it’s unlikely if we have a fire, flood, or tornado, both the church building and our apartment will be destroyed. Another advantage of Time Machine is I can go to a version of a document of a sermon or PowerPoint six months or two years ago that I may have replaced with a file by the same name. That’s been convenient a few times.

Apple’s description of Time Machine:

To create backups with Time Machine, all you need is an external storage device. After you connect the device and select it as your backup disk, Time Machine automatically makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your backup disk is full.

• I use Dropbox to save all files I’m currently working on during the current year: sermons, classes, Quicken files, spreadsheets, blogs, bulletin articles, Keynote, PowerPoint. At the end of the year, I copy all the current year’s files to an appropriate folder on my hard drive in my iMac.
  

• I subscribe to Carbonite. This is a cloud storage company that automatically backs up everything on my iMac. From any computer, I can log into my Carbonite account and retrieve any file I’ve saved.
  

• And then there’s Apple iCloud. iCloud backs up and syncs information from all Apple devices.

With Time Machine, Carbonite, or iCloud, I can transfer all files when I replace a hard drive on my computer or buy a new computer.

Any insurance I buy, I hope I don’t have to use it.

But when I have a wreck in my car or on my computer, it’s good to know I have adequate insurance.

I’ve never regretted backing up too much.