Last month we were hit with an unusual problem: Yahoo had inadvertently inserted some bad character data into their data stream for several popular stocks (including AMZN).  This problem was fixed very quickly, but there was a time window during which if you closed Personal Stock Monitor, that bad data was saved to your file.  The problem was that this bad data exposed a bug in the code that reads back the data, which caused a lot of data to disappear from the screen.  This would not be so bad if you then didn't immediately save the file, but for the people who did this and contacted us about it, unfortunately this resulted in data loss.

While this sequence of events definitely pointed out what we should do to fix our software in case this should happen in the future, it also shed light on another big problem: our customers have not been backing up their important data.  In fact, it seems some customers have been running with the same data files for years without making a single backup.  (Yes, you know who you are.  :)  )  Because our software had been extremely reliable up to this point, and their computers had been extremely reliable up to this point, this problem with Yahoo caused those few people to lose a lot of data, and unfortunately we could do nothing to recover it.

This reminded me of another fact: in our position, we get a lot of requests from customers to re-send license keys, and often they will mention a hardware failure such as a hard drive crash.  I had never before wondered what other data they might have lost in that same crash, because it stands to reason that if you lost your license key, you may have also lost your important data.  Most people would be surprised how often hard drives fail.  I've had personal experience with about a half dozen hard drive failures the years, and have only been able to recover data in a couple of instances.

So that brings me to my point: it seems that some of our customers, as a representative sample of computer users of all levels of experience, are not making regular backups, despite cheap external hard drives and USB memory sticks, and universal availability of backup software, either included free with the hard drive or available free on the Internet.  Even the most basic procedure of regularly dragging and dropping important files from the built-in hard drive on your computer to an external device could save years of work.

One thought that crossed my mind with regards to this issue is that perhaps customers don't know where their important data files are located on their hard drives.  This is certainly possible, because as I mentioned we do have customers with widely varying levels of computer experience.  Some customers may need assistance with basic computer tasks such as installing backup software and setting it up properly.  This is quite understandable, and unfortunately is beyond the scope of what we can help them with.  (However we would certainly encourage those customers to seek assistance with getting their backups set up.)

We're not going make our customers go out and buy an external hard drive, install backup software, etc., because that's their responsibility.  But the least we could do, since it is something over which we have some level of control, is to reduce the possibility of future data loss by including an automatic backup feature in Personal Stock Monitor.  (Even though we have had a Backup command under the File menu for years, which some people used, but many people had apparently not discovered it.)  What this new feature does, based on your preferences, is to either ask to make a backup, or automatically make a backup, of the current data file containing your ticker lists and portfolio data.  It places the new file in the same folder on your hard drive as the original data file, but adds a timestamp to the file name so you know what date the backup was made.  By default, on new installations this happens once every seven days, so at most you would lose seven days of data.  For frequent traders, we would advise reducing the backup interval so that you always have recent data available.

Realizing that this does not help customers who don't know where the data is stored by default, that location is C:\Documents (or C:\Documents and Settings, depending on which version of windows you're running) \[your user name]\My Documents\My Portfolios.  If you have automatic backup software that takes care of moving your important files to an external drive, you can set it up to automatically back up this folder.

With that, I will end this long post by encouraging everyone, not just our customers, but everyone, to make frequent backups of their important data.  This will avoid potentially costly problems in the future.