Better have a backup plan!

I have recently been doing a lot of work on my backup plan.  No, I don't mean my plan to work as a barista after giving up on the legal profession.  I am instead referring to backing up my hard drive.

I only started getting serious about backing up about six months ago, during the same time that I read David Sparks's Magnum Opus on going paperless.  Because I wanted to adopt the paperless workflow, I had to get serious about backup.  As a result, I purchased two Seagate Backup Plus for Mac 1 TB hard external hard drives (my main computer is a mid-2010 Macbook Pro).  I specifically purchased two so that I could keep one at home and one at the office.  My apartment is only a few miles from my office, which, of course, means that if there was a major disaster in this immediate area, it could result in both backups being lost forever.  But, if that were to happen, I think I would probably have much bigger concerns than whether my backups are okay.  The main concern I have is my apartment or office getting broken into, in which case, the burglar may very well take my hard drive in addition to my laptop (though I doubt he'd know what to do with it).

Since purchasing my two hard drives, I have solely used them for Time Machine backups.  Although I had read about Super Duper, I was a little intimidated by the program and didn't know how to fit it in with Time Machine.  But recently, I took another look at Super Duper, which is a $30 program.  The main difference between Time Machine and Super Duper is that Super Duper can actually be used as a start up drive.  This makes all the difference in a situation where time is of the essence.

So let's say your hard drive crashed and all you had done was create TM backups.  What would you have to do to get back up and running?  Well, my understanding (I'm not an expert) is that you'd probably have to get a new computer, reinstall OSX and then restore to your last TM backup.  That doesn't seem too bad, since you'll probably be buying a new computer if your hard drive is fried anyways.  But what if you have an important meeting today and all the files for the meeting were on the hard drive that crashed?  Well, then you're pretty much SOL.

But if you had backed up with Super Duper, then you can actually plug in the external hard drive with the super duper back up to another Mac and get your files directly from the drive.  In fact, if your computer is still working after the hard drive crashed, then you can press down on the option key on startup and actually select the super duper drive as your start up disk, which would enable you to get on with your day using your laptop with the fried disk as if nothing had happened.  This could also come in handy in the situation in which you have to send your mac off to Apple for several weeks.  If all you had were your time machine backups, then you'd just have to live without your files for several weeks while your computer is getting repaired.

Super Duper is definitely well worth the $30 price tag for adherent's to Murphy's law.  When disaster strikes, it will likely happen at the worst possible time.  At least with Super Duper, you know you can get to your files when you need them.

One perplexing aspect to doing both Super Duper and Time Machine backups is how to most effectively use my limited hard drive space for both.  This required me to finally learn how to partition my external hard drives.  With disk utility on Mac, you can pretty easily partition your hard drive.  The most important things to know is that the format to use is OS extended (journaled) and to select GUID partition under options, which is required for using the Super Duper partition as a startup disk.  Basically, I have partitioned both of my external hard drives and am using half of each hard drive as a Time Machine backup and the other half as a Super Duper backup.  The hard drive on my Macbook Pro is only 250 GB, so I think that 500 GB is sufficient for the Time Machine backups.

I believe that 500 GB for Time Machine backups would probably permit me to have TM backups for at least a year or more, which is really more than enough for my purposes.  I can't imagine why I would want to restore my system to farther back than last week, let alone last year.  Of course, the most obvious reason to most end users like myself that you'd want to be able to restore to a previous restore point is that if you've downloaded a virus or some other program that is wreaking havoc on your computer.  This would seem to me to be obvious in most instances immediately upon downloading the program and you would not need to go very far back to get rid of it.  The only bad thing about partitioning in my case is that I now have to do the initial Time Machine backup all over due to all previous backups being erased.  This, of course, is very time consuming and takes several hours.  But the upside is that it gave me an opportunity to note how easy it is to encrypt your backups on TM.  All you have to do is check the box when selecting a new disk.

By doing both TM and Super Duper backups on two different disks, I feel that my information is safe and secure.  The major benefit in my mind to backing up this way is that you know that content is stored locally instead of being the property of the cloud.  Don't get me wrong, I am a regular user of Dropbox and Drive, but another thing I have done recently is move as much content out of those folders and back on my hard drive.  The main reason for the doing this was because I was getting very confused by the many duplicate files I had across the various platforms.  By putting it all back on my hard drive, I've hopefully made things more organized.  But I also have security concerns about some of the files that I kept in the cloud.  I trust that most of my content is safe in the cloud.  but for some files, I'd just rather not take the risk (e.g., tax and other financial documents).  I also have an independent obligation as an attorney to make sure that my client's files are secure.  By storing their confidential information locally, I feel that I am doing all that I can reasonably do to protect their information.

Happy Holidays.

The Paperless Professional

When I first purchased my iPad mini, I knew that it could be a useful productivity device as well as a device for consuming content.  But it was not until I read the Apple iBook "Paperless" by David Sparks that I really understood the productivity power of the iPad.  For me, it truly was a "paradigm shift."  In short, Mr. Sparks explains how to capture and process all things paper into a digital system.  As Mr. Sparks explains it, our reliance on paper as a society is largely a psychological dependency that can--and should--be broken.  Through the use of Mr. Sparks system, you cannot only archive reams of paper in a digital format, but also save them in a manner that creates a usable system ensuring that you can find those documents when you need them (isn't that what keeping all that paper is all about???)  Mr. Sparks's system accomplishes this in large part by saving files by using a format of date - document description, which operates largely as a tagging system.  Then by typing a few search terms in your Mac's spotlight (shortcut:  Command + Spacebar), you can summon, seemingly by magic, those documents that you need.  If that's not cool enough for you, Mr. Sparks also shows you how to use a program called Hazel, which can name your documents for you and move them to pre-selected folders, completely automating the process.

But before you can start putting Mr. Sparks paperless system into practice, you have to select a method for "capturing" all those paper documents and transferring them into digital form.  This is where the Fujitsu Scansnap ix500 comes in.  The Fujitsu Scansnap is a high capacity scanner.  It can scan 25 pages per minute.  It also automatically scans double sided and automatically skips blank pages.  Most importantly, it creates searchable PDF documents.  If you're a PC user, you'll also be glad to know that a free copy of Adobe Acrobat (which only works with PCs) is included.  At $400, the Fujitsu Scansnap is a great deal.

As a practicing attorney, I will tell you that keeping track of paper has been the bane of my existence for the past five years.  But now that I have the capability to scan my files, and just as important, can index them by creating outlines, which are tables of contents that you can access no matter where you are in the file, I am now in command of my files.  As Mr. Sparks, who is also an attorney, puts it, the ability to locate documents with lightning speed "strikes fear in the hearts of my enemies."  Knowledge is power, especially in the courtroom or professional setting.  And the ability to locate information the second you need it can make all the difference in a high pressured situation.

Of course, I'm sure that some people fear putting sometimes highly sensitive and private information into digital form.  The purpose of this post is not to argue with the naysayers.  Every person has to determine to what degree he or she is comfortable with disseminating information once its put in digital form.  But it is very much possible to protect digital information.  The biggest aspect of the debate is over cloud computing.  I'm personally not knowledgeable enough and would not feel comfortable saying 100% of that sensitive information put in Dropbox or Google Drive is completely safe.  Another concern for attorneys and other professionals who owe a duty of confidentiality to their clients is the ownership of the files once they are put in the cloud.  In a recent legal ethics opinion here in West Virginia, attorneys were advised that they can ethically store client information electronically, but have a duty to protect the client's information nonetheless.  One suggestion in the opinion was that attorneys inform their clients of their electronic retention policies in the fee agreement, which I have adopted by placing a provision in my agreements stating that the client understands and agrees that I have the right to maintain the file in electronic form.

An important point that Mr. Sparks makes in Paperless is that cloud computing websites like Google Drive and Dropbox are for syncing, not backup (of course, there are now online backup websites, such as Carbonite).  But I do my backup the old fashioned way, I have two Seagate backup plus external hard drives.  This way, sensitive material is kept locally and not subjected to potential cloud hackers.  I keep one at my apartment and one at my office.  That way, should either place burn down or be burglarized, I still have a backup at the other.  I have been advised that encryption on the Mac is extremely easy, but I have not yet attempted it.  I probably should do this to get the most security possible.  Of course, external hard drives, like the hard drive on your computer, will not last forever, which is another reason why its advisable to keep at least two external hard drives.  I use Time Machine with both of these hard drives.

External hard drives are very affordable nowadays.  The two external hard drives described above are one terabyte and cost in the $80 range.  As time goes on, hard drive space will continue to become cheaper and cheaper, so storage space isn't really a concern for taking a comprehensive approach to digitalizing your paper documents.

I have a third external hard drive, the Seagate Wireless backup plus, which I do not use with Time Machine.  The reason I do not use this hard drive with Time Machine is that Time Machine is a versioned backup, which means that if I delete something from my computer, Time Machine will eventually back up to the point that its back up will not contain what I deleted.  I have several movies on my computer that were taking up hard drive space, so I decided to buy this third hard drive for the purpose of keeping these movies saved to it and delete them off my hard drive.  I may at some point partition this drive to use half of the space for an additional Time Machine backup.  An added bonus is that because it is a wireless hard drive, I can stream movies from the hard drive to my iPad and no longer have to download movies to my iPad whenever I want to watch them.  The hard drive is really in all respects the same as the other two hard drives described above, but the wireless ability of this hard drive drives the price up 100% to the $175 range.  But having a hard drive that works with your iPad is worth it in my humble opinion.

As with any system for the archiving and retention of documents, going paperless certainly has an array of issues for any working professional who desires to institute such a system.  But when I think about all the man hours wasted by keeping paper documents, I think that all organizations who deal in vast streams of paper will eventually see the light.

How the GTD system has changed my life so far.

Welcome to my first blogpost:  11/09/13

Since deactivating my Facebook account (for reasons I will not go into here), I have found the need for an outlet to pontificate on a wide variety of subjects that arouse my interests but few others.  Hence, this blog.  One such topic of personal interest is the use of technology to increase productivity.  But of course, such technology does diddly squat for us without the perspective and context for how to use it.  Haven't we all had the experience of downloading some new productivity software and seeing a bunch of cool example pictures showing it populated with user content only to draw a blank when actually trying to put that software to personal use.

That is where, in my humble opinion, David Allen's GTD system can make all the difference.  For those of you not in the know, GTD stands for "Getting Things Done" (pretty catchy and to the point, huh?).  And Mr. Allen's seminal work elucidating this system of task management is "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity," which can be found at http://amzn.com/B000WH7PKY

It would be a waste of time for me to go into a lengthy discussion of the GTD system, as several have done this and the book itself is quite an easy read.  Instead, I want to discuss how the GTD system has personally affected my mindset for work and life.

I think that one of the things that I never thought about before reading the book is the simple fact of how what Allen (quoting Peter Drucker) calls "knowledge work" is inherently different from the industrialized assembly line factory work most prevalent in the 20th century.  Simply put, unlike the assembly line worker whose work consists of performing a series of repetitive tasks, the knowledge worker has the sometimes overwhelming job of having to determine and define just what is his or her job in the first place.  We are usually given an overarching objective, but not given a step-by-step account of how to achieve that objective.  That is partly due to the fact that in the world of knowledge work there is rarely a "one best way" in any case and opinions often differ.  Of course, this gives knowledge workers a great deal of empowerment, independence and opportunities for creative thinking, which is precisely why knowledge workers are often passionate about their professional lives and are willing to invest much time and effort to achieve their professional goals.  But all of this is for naught if the knowledge worker can't answer one simple question that is the mantra of the GTD system, "What's the next action?"

It is around this one query that Allen developed an entire system for answering it.  As Allen so aptly puts it, many of us only do work "when it shows up or when it blows up."  The major goal of the GTD system is to prevent the latter so that we aren't constantly finding ourselves in crisis mode, but instead have the ability to do tasks when we are in our best mindset for doing them.  In a nutshell, the key is to corral all those little things we need to do, which persistently nag our psyches, into a system that we can regularly review.  This way, you are always current on what has to get done now as opposed to what you may wish to put off to another day.  This allows you to do tasks when you are in the best possible mindset for them and without being worried that you're letting something get by you.  This is important because some days you may just not have the mental strength or desire to make that difficult phone call, deal with that difficult person or sort through a complex task.  But if you've broken down all your big tasks, into smaller bites, you might find a few low energy or busy work type of tasks to get you through the end of the day.  This is what true productivity is all about, getting the most out every minute while doing so on your terms.  But you can only do this with a clear conscience if you know that that thing that you're putting off today isn't a ticking time bomb that's going to blow up on you when you walk through the door tomorrow morning.

This all may seem to be obvious, but, of course, there's a big difference between knowing that you need to do something and putting it into practice (just ask all those people who make New Year's resolutions how it's coming along on January 31st).  I've gotten pretty good at recording tasks as they come to me, but I still struggle with the essential weekly review that keeps you current.  Without them, your lists grow stale, lose their meaning and, perhaps most importantly, you can easily lose track of those ticking time bombs.

But I have also noticed some fundamental differences in my approach to work and thinking about work.  One such difference is that I don't like wasting time on having the same thought twice, which is my primary motivation for recording all tasks from the mundane to the consequential.  Of course, there's the risk that you might not have the thought again and lose out on a great idea.  But another reason is that it's just a great waste of mental energy to have to keep reminding myself about things when I can put them in a trusted system that I regularly review instead.  This probably, more than anything else, keeps me going forward in trying to master the GTD principles in my work and personal life.

My goal is to get myself to the point that I never find myself pondering over the question, "what's the next action," but instead am able to smoothly transition from one task to another with the firm knowledge that what I'm doing in the moment is what I should be doing, especially when that thing is taking a well deserved lunch break.