Yesterday, Feb 11, 2015, I found out that one of my friends had lost his entire book which he was nearly done writing. His laptop was stolen. Welcome to #Uganda. Please enjoy your stay. Another friend once had his iPhone stolen. Then another one had his iPad swiped. My friends lost all their work and they are gonna face me soon because I am tired of things being stolen. Aren’t we all?
Then yesterday (same date), I read that a young lady who was finishing a report on corruption, investigating missing funds and etc. etc. etc. was gunned down in Kampala (Uganda, The Pearl of Africa). The only thing that was taken from her was her laptop.
WHOA — can you hear me screaming? People, I do not care which political party you work for, where you get your money from, who you deal with, what you do. I do not give a damn!
Work smart. All companies (well, the ones I hang around with) have directories on servers where all your work gets saved and kept up to date with the right security to prevent people not in your group or your team from accessing it. Please use company directories to save all your documents. If you have team mates who will steal your work, put a password on each document.
Personal work, projects, articles, books, etc.. Please use Cloud computing. The document is always on your laptop or desktop and it gets synched the minute you get to an internet connection. I know speaking from Canada I am a bit spoilt but even in Uganda, you can go to an internet cafe or a place with WIFI and have your documents lifted into the cloud. Do this as many times as you get into a city or town center so that your work lives on and then you might not get killed for the laptop to be stolen because what goes into the cloud stays in the cloud. Or you could also always back up copies on USB keys (flash drives) and give them to different people, people you trust. Not one flash drive and hopefully they do not know that each of them has a flash drive of your work. You know how Uganda works, you could get a syndicate on you. Money talks, bullshit walks. Did you print your own money? I did not think so.
Finally, there is also the use of the internet to keep your work going. Even if a gun is put to your head to delete what you have written, it will live forever. You can delete it but the server on which the blog or social media account is hosted does not delete except upon a court order and even NSA has not done yet. What you put on the internet lives forever. Watch what you say on the internet. Yes, FB is on the internet. Before I am done, please learn to use Google. Search for “Cloud storage” or “Cloud computing”. The kids use skydrive, I use Google Drive and Dropbox, depending on what I am doing. There are many others out there and you will not know until you READ. READ READ.. reading is great for you.
Read more about Cloud Data Storage Explained. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage
Martha Leah Nangalama
The writer has an IT and Business background.
This article was first published on the Nangalama blog on February 12, 2015
