After weeks of hot dry weather, it feels more like Arizona than the Ozarks here. Trees drop yellowed leaves, grass bleaches in the hot sun, and only a few intrepid flowers such as the nearly leafless chicory sill bloom. But relief was at hand yesterday. It was bright and sunny when I walked to work, but the air was heavy with moisture. Clouds gathered in the afternoon and grew dark and angry while thunder rumbled in the distance.
The storm began with a brilliant flash and a loud crack that made startled me at my desk. A few drops of rain quickly gave way to white torrents whipped to froth by an angry wind. Black clouds roiled and split with flashes of lightening. Water streamed across the pavement pushed into foamy waves by the gale. Then as suddenly as it started, it was gone. Leave and broken branches littered the ground and the rich smell of earth and green wafted through the sweet, clean air.
We had a similar storm several months ago that took quite a toll on my tomato plants. Anyone who has grown tomatoes knows that their stems are stiff and quite fragile. They tend to snap rather than bending with the wind. The aftermath of that storm left me with battered leaves and broken stem. So I staked them with steel rods to protect them. Despite wind violent enough to flatten the mint, my tomatoes were nearly undamaged.
Just as I took steps to protect my tomatoes from the storm, you should take steps to protect your FundRaiser data from the unexpected. By creating backups regularly and storing them on a flash drive or external hard drive, you won’t have to worry about losing your data if a computer crashes, a virus invades, or the whole office floods. While we often hear that the entire server is backed up so manual Fundraiser backups are not necessary, I disagree. Manual backups are simple, portable, and easily restorable. This is not necessarily true with a server backup. So take a few minutes and give yourself peace of mind by creating a backup of your FundRaiser program.