I usually leave the “geek” posts for Douglas, but a comment on this article about people incurring problems upgrading their iPhone 3G to iOS 4 caught my eye.
It is in response to another comment complaining that when the person had upgraded their iphone 3G to iOS 4 they lost five months of photos taken on their iPhone. The response:
A phone is the same as a computer. If you do not make backups of your important files, you don’t own those files–you’re only leasing them from Fate.
Aside from the philosphical question of whether you can “own” data or information, I think that the idea of “leasing data from Fate” sums things up brilliantly. It emphasises the fragile nature of data and IT systems, and why making regular back-ups to multiple sources is so important. IT can and does fail from time to time; software updates can and do go wrong; and viruses can and do cause mayhem. This is why we have business continuity and disaster recovery plans (which have hopefully been tested and shown to work).
Which reminds me, I must back-up my laptop at home again…
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