Keep Your Personal Finance Data Secure

I was composing a blog post a few hours ago when the electricity went out in the entire house. I waited for an hour to see if electric service wouldn't be restored, and when it wasn't I called my electric utility to find out if this was an area-wide outage or if it was just my household with the outtage. It turned out that it was a downed power line (whew, at least it wasn't just me without electricity, but I hope no one was hurt) and it was estimated that electricity would be restored in another hour.

Being that I have a UPS, my computer did not just crash when electricity went out, but allowed me to shut my computer down gracefully. Using a UPS is very important to avoid both power surges from damaging your computing equipment and also to keep personal finance software data file from becoming corrupt. Personal finance software data files can be corrupted because they are data bases, often large data bases. If your personal finance software is processing in these databases and your computer shuts down, the files can become corrupted. Sometimes this corruption can be undone and sometimes not.

Another tool to use to avoid losing all your data is to do frequent backups to your personal finance software data files. Both computer crashes and computer viruses happen, and both can wipe out your data and make it irretreivable. Back your data up to removable storage so you can keep your data stored away from the room you do your computing in. Read up on Backing Up Microsoft Money or Backing Up Quicken if you use either Quicken or Microsoft Money for your personal finance management.

So take backing up seriously. Do your back ups and consider buying a UPS. Be sure you're running antivirus software as well.

Related: Ten Commandments of PC Security | Thumb-Sized Security | Corrupted File Defined | Don't Get Zapped by Power Surges