Three Ideas to Help You Sleep Easy

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!