....continued...Ronnie Barrett was amazed by the gun's ability and asked himself and experts if a rifle made around the 50-caliber bullet was possible?  The experts and the big gun manufacturing corporations said, "NO!" They assured him it was "Impossible."

   Ronnie asked the question to so many gunsmiths, professionals, and experts that said NO, he should have assumed that it was impossible and gone back to taking pictures. He didn’t. 

   What did a professional photographer do? With no firearm experience, Ronnie Barrett and his family went on to do just that, revolutionizing an entire industry by inventing the Barrett 50 Caliber Sniper Rifle. They did this while other larger companies stood by and watched it happen and did nothing. Sound familiar?

   Why are the average technology users so stressed out today, companies hacked right and left? Why are the odds against you when it comes to keeping your information safe if you do it the expert's way all the time? 

   For the same reason, big companies and the experts say, “It’s too complicated, we have cost issues, you don’t understand, those outages and loss of information, they just happen.”

   While the “experts” sat back, the Barrett’s first model built-in 1982, the M82, changed modern warfare and became one of the most feared guns on the battlefield and still is today.

  A good friend of mine carried the Barrett on two battlefields and in dozens of “hot zones.” He called it “The greatest leveling agent in the world if you know how to use it.” I saw Gus in a small group once “throw lead” downrange at two-pound Folgers Coffee Can, hitting the can on the first “cold bore” shot. When I looked at the range finder, it said just over a mile. 

   Another one of our friends who accompanied Gus on the battlefield said, “The enemy hearing the man with the Barrett had arrived, drove many in hiding or to leave the battlefield altogether.” The rest is history.   

   The lesson, experts get it wrong a lot, what it takes, common sense, and the ability to ask questions and do something. Doing something is the key ingredient. You can keep your information safe by understanding the problem, using common sense, and taking action. If you are a small business owner or boss, you have to know the right questions and have some principles to guide you. I am going to give you both.

   Like Ronnie Barrett, who started with a bullet and built a gun around it, data that is safe and secure is the most crucial part or foundation for any business today. We used to put locks on filing cabinets, we bought bigger ones that were fireproof, and if the documents were essential, we kept another copy someplace else. Most companies that get breached and their data is stolen or lost don’t even do the digital equivalent of a filing cabinet with an extra copy they know for sure is secure anymore.

   And the problem has gotten worse. For every Capital One Heist that stole 100 million client records reported, there are thousands, yes, thousands every day that goes unreported for fear of losing business, prestige, or having to pay fines.

Many, out of sheer embarrassment, never report the theft when they should. Do you sometimes wonder why a company went out of business? Many times it was the loss of all their information.

   That is why the security industry is so big.  “Why should we build a better gun when users buy what we have now,” the gun manufacturing industry asked. Do you get the idea?

   So, back to our experts. No one cares more about your security more than you. If your outsource experts seem to at the moment to care, they need to make higher profits.  So what do they do? They outsource parts of their business to even cheaper help, as many do already. So what to do? If you have an outsourced contractor or cannot inspect your vital information, do the following. Make sure your information is in at least three places. 

   The last statement is simpler to write than put into practice. I know because I had to invent with my friend John Brassard a former NASA scientist, a series of applications that would do just that; help keep your information in three places and make sure it is set up and working. The result, an application coded in America with NO analytic stealing algorithms. Its job, help to keep your vital information secure. And we built in such a way that anyone can learn to use it.  But first, the basics of Keeping Information Safe. 

   When I speak, the most challenging part is convincing many CIO and CEO types to take charge of one of the most vital aspects of their business, their essential information.  Information today has a monetary value that exceeds gold. Ask Google how they value their algorithms, authors their books, or accountants their spreadsheets. 

   In retrospect, we have become like the proverbial frog placed in cold water and slowly boiled to death. We put our vital information in an unseen public cloud, managed by strangers, most often in a foreign country we have never seen or even know to exist. We don’t have a strategy; we outsource.

   Capital One and thousands of companies argue their information is safe every year, yet cyber breaches keep mounting.   That brings us to the question, “How do I keep this from happening to me?” Let’s get to answering that question by first discussing the basics.

   Let me sum up the basics of never losing vital information again in four words; principles, methods, questions, and inspection.

   The “principles” help give form to the last three terms, “methods,” “questions,” and “inspection.” Let’s go over three of my seven principles involving keeping your vital information safe.

• Keep vital information in three or more places in two different formats.
• Have a copy of backups or digital-archives that are “Air-Gapped” and “Location-Safe.”
• Keep an archive copy of all your vital information you can visually inspect.

   The questions are for you to ask yourself and the people that report to you. 

   In the following chapters, we will spend a lot of time with stories that illustrate the points and how to protect yourself, but first, let’s cover the basics. 

   To understand the basics, let’s use the three principles' as a framework to discuss “How to keep your vital information safe and not fall into the trap of trusting only our expert strangers.” But first, a few definitions you will need to define for yourself, and let’s make them close to home. The words are “Data,” “Vital Information,” “Backups,” and “What Matters Most.” 

   A story will help us clarify the definitions by applying the principles, if only on a mental exercise on yourself. It also will answer a question that will come up and my concern with “The Cloud” as a backup.

   First, a question to think about, “What of all your data do you consider to be VITAL INFORMATION?” You know the stuff you can’t live without if a Tornado came calling, let’s say? That actually happened to me twice.

   A story, please. A few months ago, Richard, a friend, and writer, lost most of his work due to a stupid mistake involving his Cloud folder.

The difficulty echoes the point I am making.  Richard and his wife both make part of their living from writing and editing both documents and presentations.  Richard and his wife have a family Cloud account and share a Cloud folder for convenience and savings as many people do. 

   Before going on a two-week cruise, Helen, the constant organizer, had “tidied up” as she calls it, the folders and documents in their Cloud. While dragging a folder on his computer to the Quick Access on his menu, Richard made a mistake.

   Richard mistakenly put one of his working projects into an older folder that was no longer needed. Helen cleaned up and deleted the old folders, and they left for their month-long travels. 

   They did as Helen said, “Have a wonderful time until we got back, and it was ruined later by most of Richard’s projects disappearing.” You see, Richard, at the advice of his “Expert,” had installed a backup program that he found out had a problem.  It didn’t work. 

   Archiving, what is it, and why do I need it? The answer is because of complexity and cost. For the individual, the exception I will show you how to do both. But first, there are two reasons people lose information besides cyber-hacking; they are complexity and cost. 

   One thing to mention, using Archiving, you can never delete a file or folder by mistake. More about that later.

   You have or know someone that worked on a document or excel file for days, only to copy over it, losing the information when they discover the mistake.  It happens a lot, just on a bigger scale. 

   I have seen it happen to large corporations many times. I worked with a company that kept backups for thirteen months to find a critical patent file, and the accompanying CAD file was copied over and gone. 

   A hospital we worked with put a million patient files in one folder, creating a locked image or blob.  The result in all patient records lost. 

The files in the production folder and backups became a “Giant Blob" that could not be recovered.   

   At a Radiology practice, the doctors argued over the high cost of backup software and hardware for months only find themselves after a long holiday weekend locked out of all their files by a cyber-attack. 

   By now, my hope is your beginning to get the idea.  Let’s take Richard and Helen's story and use those three principles to shed light on how the whole incident and data loss could have been avoided.

   First, Richard and Helen didn’t know the questions to ask. Second, Richard and Helen both said their files, like the hospital, are Vital Information, but alas, they did what everyone else did and confessed they had no principles to guide them.  Richard’s vendor also made their life complicated. Per the vendor instruction, Richard needed another PC to try restoring his backup.  All he needed was a way to get his critical files archived on a USB drive. 

   Back home, it was a few days before Richard and Helen realized the data loss. Helen quickly checked the twenty years of pictures of the kids. For her, that is Vital Information; it was safe.  The rest was just data in Helen’s mind, except a few folders all could be replaced. 

   Richard wasn’t so lucky.  Richard couldn’t restore his backup, which left his provider, commenting, “We always suggest you test and make sure your backups work.” Richard said he had no such instruction he remembered. Besides, Richard noted the complexity and time to do what they suggested was past the capabilities he possessed.

   Recovering part of the Cloud data took weeks and many useless calls, chats, and e-mails.  Richard and Helen told me they felt drained and thanked me for a better way later when we discussed how to keep their information safe. 

   Now, back to our principles and words. The first principle is, “Keep vital information in three or more places in two different formats.” So to answer your question, “Yes, a business or individual should have backups.” There is one exception we will talk about last.

   In later chapters, we will discuss strategies anyone can use, why I invented the software to do just that, keep everyone’s data large and small safe, even the individual. Like Richard, I once had a backup that didn’t work, and I am very technical. Unlike Richard, I had my principles in effect.

   With the first principle in mind, let me make backups simple, straightforward, and easy to use for any size business; buy Altaro.  I have found no better in thirty years, with wonderful people with support a few seconds away.  We use Altaro for all our clients.

   But, Altaro only addresses part of the first principle.  How do I keep my "Data" and or "Vital Information" in two different formats?  The answer, Archiving.

   In the end, we did the following for Richard and his wife:  

   We first decided what was “Data” and what was “Vital Information.”  I did the same thing with the hospital and pointed out they had twenty terabytes of PDF, JPEG, and Tiff files that a simple archiving application could keep in three places for less than their costly backup that ultimately did not work.

   For Richard and Helen, we bought two Kingston DataTraveler SE9 G2 USB Flash Drives, a couple of Lanyards, and set up ArchiveIt123 to backup to both in less than five minutes. For less than twenty-five dollars, their files and folders were backed up in four places, Location-Secure, Air-Gapped, and they could visually inspect all their vital files.

   Before Richard and Helen left for a three-day getaway to Greene, Texas, I met them. Helen smiled and pointed to the lanyard with one of the USB drives looped around her purse. 

Helen then pointed to Richard and said, "I made him put it around his neck."       

   As for the hospital, we spent less than eight-thousand dollars on two table-top Netgear ReadyNAS appliances we put in the building across the street, and ArchiveIt runs once an hour and keeps each one up-to-date with no effect on the hospital bandwidth. 

   In the next chapters, we will dive into asking the right questions, what methods work regardless of your business.

   For now, I encourage you to embrace my three principles and implement them in your personal and business life. The few minutes you take will be worth the results and the protection and peace of mind it creates.