It’s 2016 and, while most people are making resolutions to lose weight and exercise more, we’re thinking about technology-based resolutions. We whittled down our recommendations to just 5 actions you can take to make your tech life a little better or more secure—many of them effortless and some of them free.
1. Back Everything Up
If you don’t already use a service like Carbonite or Mozy, we recommend doing it. If you’re on a Mac, there’s iCloud Drive, but it’s pricey. Even with a price drop, a terabyte of backup space on iCloud Drive is $19.99 per month (compared to about $60 per year for Carbonite). And if you’re on a PC, there’s Microsoft OneDrive, which offers a free terabyte of space… which can’t be beat. But neither of these native backup solutions matches the effortless, in-the-background cloud backup provided by Carbonite. With these drives, you have to manually drop files onto your cloud drive. Cloud backup services just back up all the user-generated files on your computer, constantly, without you having to do anything.
2. …and Especially Your Photos
There is no excuse not to AT LEAST back up your photos to Google Photos. Download the app for iOS, Android, and even your desktop computer and back up your photos at a reasonable size—for FREE—with unlimited storage space. You can choose to back up your photos at their original size, but then your photos will count against your existing Google Drive storage space, and you’ll most likely run out quickly. This article shows a good side-by-side comparison of original-size photos versus Google’s resized images, if you’re concerned. We think the rewards of having one of your backups be completely effortless and unlimited is worth the tradeoff. By all means, feel free to back up important images at their full size using other means.
3. Renew Your Domain Names for at Least 5 Years
This year, when your domain names come up for renewal, we recommend renewing them for 5 years or more. Not only will you enjoy considerable savings, Google has started looking at domain name renewal periods as part of its ranking. If Google sees that you plan to be around for the long haul, that reflects favorably on your domain names. Please note, if you do choose to renew your domain name for a long time, add a note to your calendar in advance of that next renewal date with the name of the registrar, login details, and any other information you might need (technical and administrative contact, how much was paid, etc.). You may also wish to record it on paper somewhere intuitive that it can be accessed in case another person eventually needs to take over the domain. These things can get lost in the shuffle.
You might also consider consolidating domain renewal dates so that they all happen on the same day every year. Some registrars, like GoDaddy, offer a service that allows you to synchronize your expiration dates—one more thing that can make your life a bit simpler.
4. Get Email Under Control
Are you still using POP email? GoDaddy stopped selling new POP email accounts a few years ago, and now all their email offerings are Microsoft Exchange-based (aka Office 365). This or Google Business Apps seems to be the way of the future. With POP email, when you read your emails, you create a local copy on your computer and delete the original message from the server (if that setting is enabled). The emails are tied to a specific computer/machine and cannot be accessed anywhere else. With Microsoft Exchange or Google Business, the emails are stored in the cloud. If you delete the email, it’s deleted from the cloud. You can access and search your email from any device anywhere in the world, and it’s constantly kept up to date. A lot of times, your email provider can upgrade your email and move it for you, or you can contact us for help.
And once you’ve got your email in the cloud, you could think about streamlining your inbox a bit. We wrote a post about cleaning up the junk in your email and we highly recommend the Clutter feature of Microsoft Outlook. Gmail has a nice Social and Promotions tabs to separate out the less high-priority stuff. But also consider using unroll.me to unsubscribe en masse from the overabundance of email subscriptions you’ve accumulated.
5. Develop a Password Strategy
Every time you forget a password, use this opportunity to reset it to a new one that’s more secure. Don’t use the same password for every login. We recommend using different passwords for different uses. For sites where you’ve created an account of no import—no financial data, no personal info—you could use one password. For more security-critical websites like your bank, credit card, Facebook, etc., we recommend using a different password. In each case, we recommend customizing the password per application, perhaps by putting the first 3/4/5 letters of the site at the beginning or end of your standard password. For example:
AMAZR1c3Kr1sp13s for Amazon
FACER1c3Kr1sp13s for Facebook
…and so on.
We at I.T. Roadmap wish you a positive and productive 2016, and with any luck these tips will help make that wish a reality.
