Will You Be Locked Out of Your Own Data?
b"In the United States, over the past 100 years, there have been seventeen periods defined as recessions. Unfortunately, a recession is the U.S. often impacts the rest of the world \\u2014 sorry. Typically a recession is \\u201ctechnically\\u201d over fairly quickly. But the effects linger \\u2014 sometimes for years. Large firms lay off associates who end up competing with smaller firms. Medium-sized firms reduce prices and impact smaller firms who lose business. Clients reduce legal spend and take a long time to ramp back up. It gets ugly quickly and it stays ugly for longer than hoped.\\nListen in Browser | Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes\\nImagine the impact of losing your laptop and your phone in a tsunami. Both of them gone, in one horrible moment. Seriously, imagine it: that's where we're going today. Things are going to get destructive and wet.\\nMost of us now keep our information--client files, notes, data, financial information, and the rest--in the cloud. Generally, it's safe there. Sure there's the occasional Russian hacker, but mostly we're much better off than we were back in the days of servers in closets.\\nHopefully, the loss of a device or two--in a tsunami or otherwise--would simply result in the need to replace your devices, restore some software, and log back into your business.\\nBut what if you couldn't get back in? What if the data was safe in the cloud but inaccessible, at least for a while, to you and your team? That could be devastating.\\nWould a tsunami wipe you off the map?\\nI refer to tsunamis quite often. Maybe I overuse them as examples. I have a little tsunami PTSD.\\nI was mildly traumatized by my time in Sri Lanka, sitting on a ghost-filled beach for a month. The same beach had been overrun on December 26, 2004 by the Boxing Day tsunami. A quarter of a million people died in the region that day. I wasn't there until more than ten years later. But the deaths that had happened years earlier still hung in the air; people choked up when the topic arose in conversation.\\nThere were grave markers everywhere I looked. I heard story after story of mothers encouraging their children to run out onto the seafloor to collect fish jumping up in the air from the remaining puddles as the water moved quickly away from the coast. The fish seemed to be a gift from god. Then, with a force I can't even imagine, the water came back in a giant wave, washing the children, their mothers and fathers, and a devastating number of people to their deaths.\\nWho has your passwords?\\nMaybe I'm just paranoid because I travel constantly. I worry about our technology and data getting lost or stolen. I've spent considerable time thinking through what would happen if we left our things in a taxi or circumstances resulted in our losing our devices.\\nOnce I thought it through, I realized that a tsunami is the perfect hypothetical for an exercise in making sure your data is safe.\\nI've worked through the tsunami scenario each time we've changed up our technology. We were using Lastpass to store passwords. We switched to 1Password. Time for a tsunami exercise. We went through it again when we ditched our MacBooks for Windows laptops. Again when we moved from Dell laptops to iPads, then Huaweis, then back to MacBooks. We've changed machines quite a bit, and the process for recovering data is very different depending on your devices of the moment. Android and iPhone each present different challenges, in the same way that Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows require different muscle memory.\\nThe tsunami scenario reveals the problems you haven't yet solved. Do the tsunami exercise any time things change. Between software and hardware swaps, we're all having to relearn our systems with great regularity. Things change fast when it comes to technology.\\nInitially I thought I was ploddi\\u2026"