incase you lose your policies

[Banana]

Hi,

just quickly.

After reading your stories of your computers crashing, breaking etc (as mine did too)

I emailed all my policies to myself so that I can accesss them anywhere should I need to. Its all very well having them on disk - what happens if you misplace that though

So its worth doing as I've had all mine in my inbox for over a year now and just print them as I need them. That way you can access them on any computer too

xx

[Tily Bud]

Thats a good tip Banana x

[carolinel]

good idea Lana, I will def do that.

uploaded all my photo's on to photobucket last night for the same reason!

[emler]

I did the same thing Lana - got all of my policy documents sitting in my inbox a couple of months ago too - just incase!!

Emler x

[mrsbumbles]

Great idea

[oakie dokie]

fab idea, its gona take a while to email all those!

hazelx

[Rubybubbles]

good idea thanks

[Mollymop]

I know I am silly but I don't understand, if your computor breaks or crashes how are you going to retrieve your files from your inbox if you have no computer cos it has broken down.

Sorry for being stupid, but i don't understand. XX

[emler]

It means you can check your emails on any computer and you will still have your policies.
If anything happened to my laptop I would be able to open my emails on my dads pc and print off my policies - hope you follow me - I'm rubbish at explaining lol

Emler x

[chubbymummy]

i follow you

what a brilliant idea i would never have thought of doing that!!!

[button68]

When my 'puter crashed last year I lost EVERYTHING including emails, address book the lot!

Was there something I could have done to retrieve the emails?

[Spangles]

I did that a few weeks back and it makes me feel a lot safer!

[Spangles]

You would still lose e-mails you have saved to the hard drive but I haven't saved mine, I just leave them in the inbox.

[manjay]

You can log onto e mail accounts on any computer. For instance my internet provider is BT so if I am away from home I just log onto my bt account to access my mail

amanda xx

[sarah707]

Ok... Mrs Doom and Gloom here, and how are you this doomy and gloomy afternoon?

Just a little note of caution...

My friend's dad is with ntl. He was keeping letters from his uncle in Australia, e-plane tickets that needed changing and all sorts of other things in his inbox and email folders.... as you do...

Did you know it says in ntl contracts that they can clear out your folders when they are older than (I think) 18 months?

They just emptied all his messages and he couldn't get them back...

[Spangles]

That's okay - don't panic! You just send them to yourself again! No probs!

[manjay]

or don't use ntl!!

amanda xx

[Forum Widower]

Sorry to put a dampner on your suggestion to email your policies to yourself, while this is a good idea it really does depend on your email provider and the type of email you use.

Web based email (Yahoo, MSN, some BT accounts etc...) When using one of these free services you are generally given a certain amount of space on their servers where your emails are stored. The emails remain in your Inbox (or subfolder if created) until you use up the alotted space, once you have reached the limit you have to delete old mail in order to receive new mail. You can log-in to your account from any pc and all of your emails will be there as they are not downloaded on to your pc's hard drive and are simply held on the provider's servers.

POP3 - this is the most popular email protocol used by email providers (tiscali, ntl, some BT accounts, pipex, demon etc... In this instance the email are delivered to your inbox via your provider's servers. Once you open the email it is automatically downloaded to your pc. You may also have access to webmail in conjunction with using Outlook on your pc but when you log in to your webmail you can only see new email as any old email were automatically downloaded to your pc when you opened them. Therefore if you email anything to yourself, as soon as you open it, it will be automatically downloaded to your pc and if your pc crashes you will lose that email.

IMAP - this is seen as a more professional (business users) option as it combines both of the above. You can use outlook to regularly check your email but when you open your email, the email still remains on your proivider's servers until you reach the storage space limit you have paid for. When you reach the limit you either delete your email or permanently download the email to your pc in order to create space for new email. So long as your email has not been permanently downloaded you can also access all of your old email from any computer by logging in to a webmail service, you can also have Outlook accounts configured on several pc's.

If you want to back up your policies there are three affordable options:

1. Open a Yahoo, MSN etc account, it is free, email your policies to that email address and you will always be able to access your policies.

2. Back up to disk - You may lose the disk so it never hurts to make more than one copy.

3. External hard drive - you can find these on ebay. Essentially they are laptop hard drives, not bulky, come in a nice case and connect simply to your pc via a USB. They are generally 20 - 100GB so you will generally be able to back up most if not all of your pc's files. An alternative storage device would be an SD card like the ones found in cameras, i believe these are available up to 8GB and also USB pen drives which also go up to around 8GB.

The best thing is if not to do all three do a combination.

Hope this is useful to everyone.

Forum Widower

[LittleMissSparkles]

Thanks Gareth I really need to back up my files and photographs x