5 Things You Should Know – Part 22

Here is this week’s You Should Know segment.

01. Sign the back of your lottery ticket

You have to eventually sign it to redeem your million dollars and signing it now alleviates potentially catastrophic madness if your winning ticket is lost or stolen.

02. The 3-2-1 rule of backing up your stuff

People have lost their most precious photos/work projects/homework assignments, etc. because their phone was dropped in the toilet or their computer was thrown across the room, or their laptop was stolen. These incidents, while tragic, do not have to mean the end of all your data if you follow the simple 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of your important files.
• 2 different formats (or places).
• 1 of those being offsite.

One copy of your data is never enough. A theft, a hardware failure, or any other tragedy could be the end of all your data. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Onsite backups, like what you get with Time Machine or other services like that are great, and can protect you from a hardware failure. They’re especially nice to have because it can take a long time to restore data over the Internet, especially if there’s lots of it. But in case of a house fire or thorough burglary, you’re going to be out of luck yet again.

That third (offsite) copy is where you get the final bit of protection. You want that backup to be far from you, so just in case your home gets hit by a fighter jet (or just a regular fire). There are lots of services that you can use to pay a minimal monthly fee to back up your data. Here’s a short list:

• Crashplan
• Backblaze
• Mozy
• Carbonite

I personally use Crashplan, and pay about $4/month for the peace of mind that, should anything happen to my home, and my laptop, and my desktop, I won’t lose everything. I started paying when I was working on my dissertation, because there was no way I was going to be the guy who got 150 pages into it and lost it all to some freak accident.

If all you want to save is your personal photos, options you could use are Dropbox’s Camera Upload, or Google Photos backup, or iCloud photo back up, which are super helpful for getting things from your phone to another device so an SD card failure or phone theft doesn’t lose all the pictures. Google photos provides unlimited photo storage under 16 MP photos. Flickr too offers 1 TB of photo storage data for free in case you’re out of free Dropbox or Google Drive space.

03. 73% of car seats are not used or installed correctly

Check out safekids.org for tips on properly fitting, installing, and using car safety seats for your children. Also, check seatcheck.org to find a location near you that will check your car seat for proper installation.

As a father, I want my kids to be in the 27%. Let’s keep our little kids safe.

04. In the event of a car accident…

In the event of a car accident, the risk of injury/death to front seat riders raises at least 22% when the back seat passengers do not wear their seat belts. Back seat passengers basically become a projectile which puts everyone in the vehicle at a much greater risk of injury and death. Many states are now making it a law that back seat passengers must wear their seatbelts.

Source

05. Visa Surcharge

According to Visa rules, retailers are permitted to apply a surcharge to ONLY credit card purchases and cannot impose a surcharge for purchases made using a debit or prepaid card. More info here. You can file an inquiry here. This applies to MasterCards too.