First Take

When’s the last time you backed up your computer, readers?

This once was a task I was pretty faithful about doing, but at some point, it dropped off my radar.

Last week, I unearthed an external hard drive and backed up everything on my laptop.

I was motivated in large part by the cyber attack over at Yuma Regional Medical Center, which reminded me what torture such attacks can be.

The Yuma Sun was hit several years ago by a similar attack. I was on vacation at the time, but fortunately, prior to leaving, I had backed up the newsroom to an external hard drive.

Both the hard drive and my laptop were not linked to our network, and were spared from the attack.

Most of what we do is now cloud-based computing. But that doesn’t mean backups are any less important.

Take the time to back up your computer, readers. You never know when it might be the saving grace.