I got a call yesterday morning from my friend Suzanne. I knew she had just gotten back from a two-week vacation in Mexico and I was eager to hear how it went.

The vacation? “Fabulous.” Great weather, fancy drinks and fun every day.

There was just one problem, though. <strong”>Her laptop was stolen out of her luggage at the airport. And here’s the absolute worst part: it wasn’t backed up.

Ugh. While I’ve (thankfully) never had my computer stolen, I have had my hard drive blow up more than once, so I know what it’s like to lose everything.

The first time it happened, in that moment of realizing that my information was really gone, I instantly started to think about the photos that I’d never see again, the emails from friends and family that I’d wanted to keep, and the financial and client work that was lost. Talk about stopping me right in my tracks.

When it happened to me I had a (sort of) reasonable excuse. Backing things up in those days was techie and complicated. You needed an external hard drive. You needed software that was difficult to configure, and you needed to know how to restore everything in the event of a disaster.

Today it’s much, much simpler. The technology is easier, less expensive and way more reliable. Truthfully, and particularly if you’re running a business, there’s no longer any reason not to have everything backed up.

Here are the three legs of my data protection stool:

1. The Big Back Up. I use Carbonite as my backup tool at RocketGirl Solutions and recommend it to all my clients. For $5 a month, Carbonite happily backs up the files on my desktop and those in My Documents, My Photos, My Music and any other folder or file that I designate. It does this constantly, without my active or conscious involvement. 

With Carbonite, I can restore some or all of my files at any time to any machine. And what’s really cool is that it saves a copy of these files for three months. So, if you wish you had an earlier version of one of your documents, you can retrieve it in seconds.

2. The Insurance Policy. Since I’m already using Dropbox as a way to share work with my clients, I have it do double-duty as my backup backup(!!) It’s my insurance policy in case there’s a Carbonite problem.

Dropbox keeps a copy of all the files I store in my Dropbox folder, both on my hard drive and on a big server that’s accessible from anywhere by logging into my Dropbox account. So if you’re a Dropbox user, all you need to do is drag your important folders (My Documents, My Music, etc.) into your Dropbox folder for safekeeping.

3. The Cloud. Even with reliable backup, there are some big, unwieldy files (the Outlook .pst file, all those QuickBooks files, etc.) that are a pain to deal with and restore on your local machine. With these monsters, while you might have the data, you’ve still got to get yourself back up and running.

So my overall plan this year has been to move to “cloud-based” services.

Instead of Outlook, I use Gmail and Google Calendar. Instead of QuickBooks, I’ve switched to Xero. I figure I’ll let the professionals at these great companies worry about keeping things secure and running. Plus, with the cloud, I can access my stuff from any Internet-connected machine in the world (hmmm… might be time for a trip to Paris).

I love data, and I love how easy and cheap it’s become to store, retrieve and manipulate the bits and bytes of my life. But the more we save, the more at risk we are. Get your data backup plan humming this year and sleep easy. 

Au Revoir!

Here at RocketGirl headquarters, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is generally pretty slow. Most of my clients take that time off to be with family and friends, so this year I planned ahead and decided to make the most of my downtime.

I sat down one evening (glass of wine in hand) and thought about the ways I could make my business run even more smoothly in the coming year.

I came up with a number of terrific ideas and wanted to share three really good ones with you; I suggest you consider doing them, too.

1.  Get your contacts in order. If your business is anything like mine, I’m guessing that most (and certainly, the best) business comes from referrals.

If that’s the case, then it makes sense to get a good handle on the people you know, and develop an approach for staying in touch with them.

Last month I began using a new contact management system called Contactually (this is my affiliate link: http://www.contactually.com/i/yfrlnxho). I love it.

With Contactually, I can quickly divide my contacts into “buckets” of clients, prospects, people I want to keep in touch with, etc., and decide how often I want to be in contact with each group. Once that’s set up, Contactually reminds me every day (via email) of the people it’s time to get in touch with.

It’s like having a part-time assistant.

I integrated Contactually with my Gmail account, so now it tracks all my email correspondence and places notes in a person’s record whenever we exchange messages. It even keeps their contact information up-to-date by “scraping” their email signature and also tracking their social media accounts, (Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter) so I always have current information.

2.  Get your finances in order. I admit it; the year-end “get my receipts and expenses in order for the accountant” struggle is something I have personally experienced.  This prompted me to look for a way to automate things and make staying up-to-date as simple as possible.

I did some homework and discovered a “cloud-based” service (meaning that you log into the service rather than keep everything on your computer) called Xero. It was exactly what I was looking for.  I was able to link my PayPal account, credit cards and bank accounts (both business and personal) to Xero, which automatically syncs all my transactions every day.  

Even better, Xero learns as it goes. What I mean is that once a transaction from a vendor like Mobil Oil comes through and I classify it as “Auto: Fuel,” Xero will automatically classify it that way in the future. So fabulous.

Also, since it’s in the cloud, my bookkeeper can easily log in with his own username and password (I can restrict what he can see and do if I like) to reconcile my accounts, send me invoices to approve and pay my bills, even though he lives thousands of miles away.

3.  Get your routine in order. Finding better services to use is great, but without a routine and a checklist to work from, it’s difficult to create lasting habits. So the most important thing I did to get ready for the New Year was to get a new notebook and make a list of the things I need to commit to every day, without fail.  

The things on this list include:

• tracking mileage
• reconciling expenses
• responding to emails within 24 hours
• reading a business-related book for at least 30 minutes each day
• get together in person with at least one colleague each week

These are the kinds of things that, while important for long-term success, are easily avoided if not set as part of a routine. Every day, I simply turn to a new page and make notes about what I need to do on that day and check them off as I go.

So that’s it. Three simple things all focused on helping my business-and yours-to run more smoothly in the coming year. (I won’t even tell you the great ideas that came to mind after the second glass of wine. That’s a subject for a future newsletter!)

All the best for a wonderful, profitable, fabulous 2013!