I have been unlucky with technology this year. To be honest I've probably been very lucky in the past. I've had no back up system and have lost very little.
That has all changed though and after some big hits and misses I have it sorted. It was nowhere near as complicated as I had always thought.
Mid year I lost my school hard drive in my laptop ( nope not backed up to the network) and a USB which was my only ( I know !!!) copy of files and student work. ( totally irresponsible). I found it so hard to be working PC at school saving to network not accessible from home copying files to the laptop to the USB. Working on my iMac at home was far more comfortable than hunched over my laptop but I was using pages which would open word but word wouldn't open pages so I'd have to safe twice. You can see this was a recipe for disaster. So when it all went haywire I had to find a solution.
Firstly I signed up for Office 365. $119 a year which can be used across 5 devices mac or/and PC. I actually got the uni edition because it's offered for educators so was way cheaper than that. This allows me to at least work totally in office.
Then I started a Dropbox. I started on the free plan but have since upgraded to the $100 a year plan. Now I have a folder for school which I save directly to bad can access from anywhere. (Office 365 has a sky drive allowance gar works the same way). So now my files are always safe bad I'm not flicking through folders to find things. It syncs to all my devices ( including my phone).
Finally I bought two external drives. One which I have dumped a copy of all my photos on - and I'll do that each couple of months. The other is a back up that I attached to my iMac and clicked time machine and set it to create a back up each day at 2.00am. It's a set and forget type thing. Lucky I did because my hard drive on my iMac failed this week. A quick trip to Apple confirmed that. Fortunately? The fault was a known one and my hard drive was replaced for free! Thank you apple. We have now reinstalled from the back up and I am up and running again.
That's my solutions for now and fingers crossed seems to be working well. I'll keep you up to date if anything else goes hay wire but I'd love to know any other clever and easy solutions you have to keeping everything ticking over. I'd really love a password solution - that totally does my head in and when I forget one and reset and Im told I can't have a password that I have had in the past thats when I totally lose it - cause then I have to create yet another one!
