Checking and responding to e-mail is one of the biggest time consumers in the modern office these days. How has one of the most successful leaps in technology and necessary components of the office become such a burden? The system is misused and abused. It is not just spammers causing harm, but also family, friends, co-workers, and sometimes even ourselves.

Almost 70 percent of the e-mails sent in September were spam, according to Symantec’s State of Spam monthly report. If you are not using spam filters on your mail server or mail application, you are probably wasting time going through e-mails you do not need. If you are using Outlook, make sure you have the latest updates from Microsoft (http://office.microsoft.com). Whether using a Mac operating system or Windows, select the “Mark as Junk” feature, rather than just deleting junk messages. Those systems continuously learn. As you mark more things as junk, the more the system understands what is junk and filters it out before it gets to your inbox.

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Please back up your computer. I beg of you. It has come to begging. I am at the point of begging because I have had two incidents this week that have been extremely stressful for the users and their wallets. In both situations, the data loss could have been prevented, or at least minimized, by regular backups.

The first screwup came from what I call “the loan.” We see this often. In this case, the machine in question was lent to another employee for a presentation, and it came back missing data. It often happens when the temporary user is removing whatever files he or she was working on and accidentally deletes files or folders of the owner. Not a difficult fix, but not always successful and not particularly easy on the user. Typically, the files usually still exist on the hard drive and are recoverable. However, deleted files often are stripped of their file names. Because of this, when they are recovered, they are named in the numerical order of recovery. This can make finding the “really important” file very difficult in a collection of 3000 numerically named files. Although it is not always a disaster, it is very time consuming.

The second incident was more disastrous. My friend, currently working for a large computer and consumer electronics company was finishing end-of-quarter bookkeeping when her machine locked up. Needing to finish work, she took it to the service center where her problem was diagnosed as a hard drive failure. Needing data off it, she took the drive to a data recovery center, in her area, where its condition was downgraded to “catastrophic” drive failure. She had recently been given a work computer and was in the process of organizing all of the data moved onto it from her old machine. After this was completed, she planned to backup her machine onto an external hard drive. However, she never got to that point. She ended up calling me because at her previous job we’d helped facilitate a failed drive to DriveSavers.

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