NOAA Weather Radios and Why You Need Them

 

It sure seems like Mother Nature has lost her mind of late, or maybe she's found it, and She's trying her hardest to give us all the boot before we finish her off, like shaking off aggravating fleas, so to speak. Either way, it's a good time to remind everyone that they should have at least two good NOAA weather radios on hand, a tabletop and a portable model, both with battery backup and both with SAME technology.

A Weather Radio may seem like a low-tech and superfluous solution, but it's not. I can hear you saying to yourself as you read this; "No thanks, I watch the Weather Channel, plus I've got my phone for alerts, and that works just fine for me." Problem is that may not always be the case. Sometimes you're in an area with poor cell coverage, or even worse, none at all. Cell towers can be down in an emergency as they often involve extended power outages and destructive forces, and sometimes emergencies happen in the dead of night, when you're dead asleep. That's where these devices really shine, and why you need them. They’re loud, automatic, and work everywhere. Ours is so loud it scares the crap out of us even in a deep sleep, and that's what you want in an emergency. Plus, the broadcast is free, once you buy the radio, you're protected, no subscription necessary, unlike your phone.

So, now that I've proven to you that they're a necessity (I hope), here's what you need:

You should have a tabletop model for your home that plugs in to AC power and has battery backup, because you want it on all the time. You also want SAME technology, which allows you to tailor the reporting areas and categories, so the alarm/siren isn't going off for stuff that's either too far out of your area, or your area of interest. The Midland WR120B NOAA Weather and Emergency Alert Radio is a very good choice for this one. It's affordable, easy to set up and gives you very clear and readable information, both alerts and up to the minute weather reports for your area. It also has simple color-coded warning lights. There are no AM or FM bands on this one, but I'm good with that. If that's a deal breaker for you, the next model up, the Midland WR400, does have both AM and FM, plus a few other tricks up its sleeve. It's a little more expensive, and a tiny bit harder to set up and read, but it's a very good option as well.

For a portable, you want something like the Givoust 8000mah NOAA radio. This one makes the top of every camping and emergency preparedness list out there. It has excellent reception and battery life, plus the batteries are rechargeable via USB, solar and crank power. It also has SAME technology. and it has an "Alerts Only" setting, so you can keep it on without running down the power. It also has AM and FM bands, a couple of lights, and multiple charging ports for your phones. It's perfect for both travel and to have on hand at home for those really long power outages.

NOAA weather radios not only broadcast the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast but also the Emergency Alert System (EAS), so these radios will alert you to a myriad of things besides just severe weather: Natural disasters, AMBER alerts, terrorist attacks, chemical releases and spills, nuclear power plant emergencies, the list goes on and on, and that SAME technology I mentioned earlier allows you to custom tailor which ones trigger the siren feature, e.g. I don't want to be woken up for a Required Monthly Test, no thanks, lemme sleep, but a nuclear meltdown? Yes please, shake me and wake me. I'm not gonna lie, self-preservation and sleep are my things, and always in that exact order. Note: most of the emergency events are on by default and can't be disabled, but that's a good thing, as my friend Martha always says. The tailoring you do will be mostly area related. Here's a link to the list of EAS Alerts received by these radios, you can see it's pretty comprehensive and there are very few types you'd want to mess with: EAS Selectable Alerts

So, a tabletop and a portable Weather Radio will run you less than a Hundo combined, and I'd say that's a pretty cheap price for both safety and peace of mind. Order them now, don't delay, it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature, she always comes out on top.

That is all.

Protecting Your Digital Photos and Documents

 We all have a ton of data on our devices; important documents, photos of friends and family, stuff you just don't want to lose. Anything can happen though, disaster is always lurking right around the corner. Spill your coffee on your laptop, drop your phone into the pool, your devices can even just up and stop working, and poof, everything is gone in a flash. That's why you need to back up those important files, and you need to do it now. Do not wait until it's too late.

There's lots of ways you can do it, and they're all relatively easy. You can back your files up to the cloud, you can use a backup program that will copy your files to an external hard drive and then do incremental updates to the saved data every time you make a change on your device, or you can just copy and paste the files you want to protect to an external drive. You have lots of options, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Let's review a few.

Cloud backups can be seamless and easy, but the cloud can get hacked, so I'm not a big fan. I don't want any more of my data floating around in the ether for some bad guy to poach and resell on the dark web, there's enough of it out there already. I'm always getting a notice from some institution or other saying, "We regret to inform you that all of your personal information has been compromised. Not to worry though, we've signed you up for 3 free months of Experian Credit Monitoring Services and DeathGrip ID Theft Protection coverage. Enjoy it on us! (special terms and conditions apply)."

No thanks, I'm good. The best and most reliable way to safeguard your data is to back it up to an external hard drive. I don't like to use automatic backup software to do it though. It's always running in the background, and it slows the crap out of your devices. Plus, it backs up stuff that you really don't need to back up. The file structure it creates on your external drive isn't very intuitive, either. I 'm going to show you a relatively easy way to back up your files, and I guarantee it will take a little bit of the worry out of your life.

My preferred back up method is to copy and paste my primary file folders over to an external drive and then update it on a regular basis. It's quick, easy and painless, and the file structure is simple, it's just a straight up copy of your hard drive. The folders you want to back up (or copy) on a PC are shown below. Note: If you save a lot of stuff to your desktop, you should copy that folder over as well. 

These 5 (or 6) folders hold all of your personal data, and that's all you want to be backing up and storing, cuz that's what's really important here, protecting your stuff, not Microsoft's.

For a reliable external drive, I like to use a simple USB plug and play drive like the Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Slim Hard Drive. It's small in size but big on storage, and there's no power cords to fuss with. It works off of a built in USB 3.0 cable, drawing its power from whatever device its plugged into. It comes with preloaded backup software, but I don't use it. As I mentioned earlier, backup programs always seem to be running when you don't want them to, dragging your device down. I just plug in the USB drive to my device, open it up, ignore the preloaded software and create a couple of folders.

In this example, I've created a desktop backup folder and a laptop backup folder. Inside of each of those folders I create dated sub folders, e.g. "Laptop Backup 07 01 2025". There's plenty of room on these drives to do multiple backups of each device, and you should. Next, I copy and paste my main folders from the device's hard drive to the external drive's new dated folders. Simple as that. You can copy and paste one folder at a time, or do them all at once, your choice.

Once the external hard drive starts to get full, I delete the oldest dated subfolder before I create another one, this way I always have multiple copies of all my files on the external device, and I never run out of disk space on it.

But what about the pics on my phone, you say? The best option is to sync your phone, tablets and any thumb drives or SD cards you have with your PC or Mac on a regular basis. Then when you back up your PC to your external drive you catch everything in one neat package. It's the same principle as above, you don't need any fancy software or devices, just plug your mobile device into your PC or Mac with a USB cable and copy and paste (or drag and drop) the pictures and files over to the computer. Easy peasy. Synching your mobile devices also allows you to safely remove pics and free up storage space on them, something we all need to do.

Bonus Tip: For added peace of mind, I store my external hard drives in our little grab and go SentrySafe burn box. If disaster strikes, all of our docs and pics go with us, even if our devices don't make the cut.

Bottom line, you don't have to do it my way, but you do have to do it. Choose whatever method you're most comfortable with and do it without delay. Do not be that person that calls me on a Monday night in a panic and says "Help, that new upgrade just bricked my device and now I've lost all of my family pictures." All I'm going to do is give you the number for the Geek Squad, and wish you Godspeed and good luck, because you're gonna need it, all of it.