Technology Inner Sanctum
By Gene Melchionne, Esq. Law Offices of Eugene S. Melchionne Waterbury, Connecticut
[ Comment 8 to the ABA Model Rule 1.1 on competency requires lawyers to keep“ abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology …”. That rule has been adopted by 26 states as of 12 / 31 / 16. This column will attempt to help the bankruptcy practitioner understand the inner sanctum of technology.]
Where will you be on March 31 st? It’ s“ National( World) Backup Day”, that day once a year devoted to reminding you to review your data backups and policies. I, for one, hope that you don’ t wait for that one day a year to create a backup of your data. There is a move to make this a National Holiday that occurs every Friday the 13 th. Won’ t that be fun?
Backup, backup, backup Data is ethereal. You can’ t see it or touch it unless it is displayed on a screen or printed out on paper.( You are paper-less right? That’ s a topic for another day.) Storage devices of every type will fail at some point, even paper. Does anyone remember“ wet” photocopies or early faxes that would fade with time? Paper burns, hard drive platters fail, even solid-state devices have a limited lifetime. To paraphrase, failure to plan for failure is a definite plan for failure.
A simple rule is“ 3-2-1”. Easy to remember, easy to follow. Have minimum of 3 copies of your data, in 2 different physical locations and 1 copy in a different storage format.
Three Copies
Making three copies is the easiest to do. The speed of modern hard drives and computers can copy off data in relatively short time. You should be to make three copies of your data in less than a few hours. You don’ t have to sit by and watch the process; it is fairly automated.
Cost should not be a barrier, either. An external hard drive connected to your computer comes cheap. For about $ 100, you can purchase storage measured in terabytes. Buying a few units for backup purposes should cost much less than the purchase of a new computer.
Two locations Storing your data in a different place just makes sense. Nothing is indestructible.( Visit www. willitblend, com for a few minutes of disturbing entertainment.) If you had a fire at your office, what would survive? You might lose everything in the building, furniture, files and of course, computers.
With an inexpensive external hard drive, you can disconnect that unit and take it home. These units are portable. Now if some natural or unnatural disaster should strike, you still have a copy of your information. Keep in mind that you still need to safeguard that information once it leaves your office. You don’ t want that information falling into the wrong hands.( Security is another topic lined up for a future article.)
!( one) different format
Creating a backup copy in a different format is probably the most difficult part of 3-2-1. In the early days of computers, you would back up to a large tape-drive.( Anyone remember those?) Then there were floppy disks of various sizes, Bernoulli discs, burnable CDs, DVDs, and even writeable Blue Ray disks. With hard drives measured in terabytes, none of these storage formats work. A one terabyte hard drive backup would result in a truckload of more than 729,000 floppy disks, 4,000 CDs, or nearly 150 DVDs,\. That is not to mention the time that it would take to put in the disk, wait for it to copy, eject it, and repeat.
Cloud storage of some type is
10 CONSUMER BANKRUPTCY JOURNAL Spring 2017 National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys