Category: Business Reading

3-2-1 Backup!

Have you ever cried over a “dead” hard drive? I nearly did last week when the data partition of my laptop suddenly no longer appeared. It took me a few very nervous hours to fix it, especially when I realised that I did not have a recent backup…

In a survey conducted by Backblaze, 54% of people said they either knew someone, or had themselves recently lost data. And everyone has heard of ransomware attacks where they encrypt your files (making them inaccessible) and demand a ransom payment (usually in untraceable cryptocurrency) to decrypt them. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan file that the user is tricked into downloading or opening when it arrives as an email attachment.

All this got me thinking about backing up my data and it seems that the most recommended back-up strategy is the 3-2-1 method!

A 3-2-1 strategy consists of having at least 3 copies of your precious data: “two” of them local but on different media and at least “one” copy off-site.

Having “two” local data versions, your main one and an onsite back-up, is useful if your laptop hard drive crashes. You will then have a copy on an external hard drive readily available to get the majority of the data back or to use on another computer to continue operation. If you keep this copy up to date, then the data loss will be fairly minimal, as you will only have lost the files that were on your laptop but that you had not yet copied onto the external backup drive.

I personally use a mirrored hard disk strategy where all the data is simultaneously written to two “mirrored” hard drives. The second one stores an exact copy of the data from the first one in real time. This way, if one dies through hardware failure, then the other one is always there.

This may sound perfect, but it is not. This is where the “one” of the 3-2-1 strategy comes in. If your house catches fire, then both your data sources will be gone. Even if you are not as pessimistic, burglars often take laptops and removable hard drives (as they are easy to resell) and this would again leave you high and dry. Therefore, it is essential to always have another copy of your precious data in a different physical location.

This “off-site” backup can take the form of another removable hard drive stored at work or at your parents. Alternatively, it can be a remote backup on a server in the cloud. As the coronavirus lockdown as shown, getting to a second “offsite” physical copy of your data may not always be as easy as a quick drive away, so I have chosen a remote internet connected NAS as my off-site solution.

I hope this post serves as a reminder for you to think about your back-up strategy, but the important point to make is that any strategy is only as good as its implementation. Forgetting to update your backups for over a year will not help!

Establish a frequent back up schedule, based on your assessment of how much data you are willing to lose. It also depends on how often you generate updated data… Nightly backups in an office environment are the norm, but maybe only monthly is quite sufficient at home. Automatic scheduled backups are the best because you don’t have to remember to do them!

There are plenty of free and paid software around. Some keep multiple versions until you run out of a predetermined storage space. Some only update the changes so that they don’t take as long to perform. I personally use and like Allwaysync (https://allwaysync.com/). But make sure you start adopting good regular backup habits from now on.

PS: By the way, a big thanks to EaseUS (https://www.easeus.com/) for their great customer service on their Partition Magic Pro software that I used successfully to recover my missing HD partition.

Dealing with Monkeys… before you go nuts!

While having coffee after lunch at my daughter’s, I found this book she recommended as a quick fun read: “The one minute manager meets the monkey” by Ken Blanchard, William Oncken Jr and Hal Burrows. It did not take long to read and I enjoyed it and it’s managerial lessons which I will try and summarise here. I strongly recommend getting the book as it’s full of Illustrative examples yet is still an easy, quick and enjoyable read.

The book’s central theme is that if, as a Manager, you feel overloaded, you lack time for your staff, your staff can’t work because they are waiting for your decision and you have lots of projects you have not even started to work on…

… it’s simply because you have too many monkeys on your back !

Monkeys (like problems) are four-legged animals that have a tendency to jump from one person’s shoulders to someone else’s. For every monkey (or assignment), there are always two parties: one that works it and one that supervises it. Often employees come to see you with their problems. As a manager, what you must avoid at all cost is to end the discussion with “ let me think about it and I’ll get back to you”. If you act this way, then the monkey has squarely jumped from the employee’s back onto yours! Willingly or unconsciously, when people see that you are keen to attract monkeys, they channel even more your way…

As a Manager, what you don’t want to do is to swap role with your staff. The more monkeys you have on your back, the more you become overworked with no free time. You end up spending more time at work, becoming anxious and keeping your door closed to concentrate on your workload. And when you have not done what you said you would do, you become a bottle neck to your staff who patiently await your decision/action to move the problem further!

It also sends the message to your staff member that because he/she is not capable of handling this problem, you have to take care of it yourself. The more you take care of things, the more dependent they become. In the process, their self esteem and confidence is eroded.

So put the monkeys back on your people’s shoulders and suddenly you will have more time for them and more time for you to work on your own legitimate monkeys.

The authors suggests the following rules to make sure the monkeys stay where they belong: The dialog between boss and one of their people should not end until all monkeys have:

(1) Descriptions – A monkey is whatever the next move is on a project or a problem

Every subordinate should come with a thoughtful suggestion for the next move. Replace “let me think about it and I’ll get back to you” by “Think about it some more and let’s review your ideas in a couple of days”

(2) Owners – the monkey is clearly assigned to a person

Monkeys should be handled at the lowest organisational level consistent with the monkey’s welfare (so they don’t get sick and escalate to an emergency)

(3) Insurance policies – the risk should be covered

Ask staff to, most of the time, act and then advise of their action later. Only in certain dangerous/tricky situations should they ask approval before acting

(4) Monkey feeding and checkup appointments – the time and place for follow up

Proper follow-up leads to a healthier monkey. Every monkey should have a regular checkup. And always ask yourself: “Why are we doing this?” If there is no viable answer, shoot the monkey, so you are not wasting time!

The book gives you a final interesting definition: “Assigning” involves a single monkey, “delegation” involves a family of monkeys”…

I hope you enjoyed this quick and dirty summary of this book about Monkeys. It reminded me of another more recent leadership book where the Captain never gave orders or instructions but always asked his XO what he was going to do next and either agreed or asked why he was taking that decision. In this way he not only had no Monkey transfers but he built Leaders. I recommend this book, it’s a great story.

Which internet browser are you using ?

Just started a French book that the person sitting next to me on a plane was reading recently and recommended. The book is about becoming more efficient at work so that one can feel more on top of things and improve the time spent on life vs work. A noble cause !

Apparently people who use Chrome or Firefox as their internet browser are more productive than people who use Internet Explorer or Safari…

This is not because of the browser but because these people look for alternatives to the obvious/default that is presented to them in life… Oops !

The book says that becoming more efficient is a journey full of little steps that don’t gain you much but add up in the long run a bit like compound interest.

This Kaizen quest is all about regularly investing a little in the short term to gain long term benefits. We need to constantly challenge ourselves and the way we work to find better ways of doing lower value, tedious and repetitive tasks.

The concept is certainly worth thinking about and sounds promising.

I’ll let you know in future blogs if this book “La 25e heure” by Declair, Dinh and Dumont is worth a read.