Today my computer shut down. Suddenly, out of the blue. I was quite angry because I had quite some text written out and unfinished in the web page text areas. Of course, everything is lost. You have surely experienced same problem from time to time, the most common culprits are “back” button and “close” shortcut pressed in error, at least for me.
Today, this experience forced me to look for a solution. And it’s not that hard, it seems. I found a nice Firefox extension called Lazarus. It saves the form data automatically and allows you to restore it in the event of crash/accidental page close/etc.
I’ve been using it for just an hour now, but it seems to behave well. I did a test run where I populated Trac ticket text area and then killed the browser. The text was saved and I could restore it. Finally! 🙂
I’m a backup fanatic. I try to backup all my personal data regularly. And I don’t mean just documents stored locally on my laptop. I also mean all my data located at various network services (“in the cloud”). Do you really believe that Google servers won’t suffer a major incident and won’t lose all your emails some day? I don’t. And what about your appointments in a web calendar, your RSS feeds in a web RSS reader, your photos at a web photo gallery, etc – do you believe it will stay there forever? I don’t. So I back up everything.
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