Personal Digital Disaster Management

What does that mean? In this world of digital communication where email/mobile are the key instruments to be in touch with the world, imagine a day when you cannot log into your mail account and you have also lost your mobile phone. Afraid of such a day? I hope none of you get to see such a day but it actually happened with me. My mobile was stolen when I was in Amritsar for a personal trip and somehow someone hacked my yahoo password and I lost access to that. You just cannot imagine my state. I was feeling so helpless, not able to reach out. Suddenly in office I felt lot of extra time. Why? Because I lost access to my yahoo messenger also :(. The only saving grace was Orkut which allowed to communicate to some of my friends there. Without mobile, I lost all numbers (never took a backup) cutting me from the world further. Things got complicated as yahoo didnt mail me the password to my alternate mailid as i didnt know my secret question. Legally I had all the information to get the password mailed to me but that never happened. I hope I can sue Yahoo and set an example.

After settings things back in order in few days which meant buying a new mobile and using a alternate email id, I thought how to minimize the impact of such a loss in future. I have come up with few guidelines to reduce the impact in case of digital disaster.

1. Always remember phone number of some key people whom you can communicate with in case of phone theft to block your mobile. The person can be your flatmate, your office friend or your parents.

2. In case your wallet is also stolen, keep your Credit Card numbers safely written down somewhere which you can retrieve (at home) and immediately block them.

3. Use SynctoPC feature of your phone to backup all your contacts. Keep taking backup at regular intervals.

4. To minimize the impact of email getting hacked, set mail forwarding in your primary mail account to some secondary email id. This will allow you to take backup of all your mails automatically. So in case you loose access to primary account, you atleast dont loose important mails and contacts.

5. Orkut provides a method of downloading all your contacts in a .csv file. Keep generating that file at regular intervals and take backup of that.

All this would seem unnecessary hassle at the begining but believe me, its worth taking the pain. When I say take regular backups, i mean it regularly. Schedule such activities every forthnight/month and please please dont press the Snooze/Dismiss Button.

I will keep adding to this article as and when I get some better tools for personal disaster management.