This is kind of one of those things that everyone knows they should do, but few people actually take the time to do consistently.

Always.  Make.  Backups.

Now, I’m not even talking about how important this is for your home computer with all your person files on it.  It’s one thing if your hard drive crashes or whatever and you lose all your music and videos and pictures and papers that you wrote back in high school and whatever else you had saved on there for sentimental reasons.  And indeed, it’s a tragic thing.

But it’s something entirely different if you lose a hard drive with business stuff on it: client information, proprietary information, financial records, etc.  You are quite screwed if you lose that.  What if the notes for the project you’re working on for a client disappeared?  How would you feel if you had to call them and say “btw, we need to have that meeting again because I lost our notes”?  Or what if your expense record vanished?  Have fun doing your taxes when you no longer have a record of how much you paid for what things.

Always back everything up with multiple redundancies.  External hard drives.  Thumb drives.  Email things to yourself.  Online (cloud) storage.

Actually, that last one is the one area I want get into.  Right now, my backup process involves copying everything onto an external hard drive, and copying the important files onto a thumb drive.  I also email myself a copy of all the important files every so often so I have a copy of them sitting on my email server as well.  But I want to learn more about cloud storage.  If you’re not quite up to date like me, the “cloud” is just another term for “online.”  Storing something “on the cloud” means “on the internet.”  I don’t know why they came up with another word for it, but they did.  Anyway, what it means is you keep a backup of your files on a server so you can access them from anywhere.  Not only is this useful in case you need to recover your files, but you can also access them from wherever you have internet access, which can make business trips easier since you don’t have to worry about bringing the files with you.  But like with anything, there are a few different providers offering that type of service, so I’ve been reading some cloud storage reviews to try and figure out which one will be best for me.

I know, I already have 3 layers of backup, but since we’re talking business data that I really don’t want to lose, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking extra precautions.

Not to mention, I don’t want to lose all my music, either!