This is the first-ever “What’s In Your Toolbox?” post. Thanks to Linda M. Lopeke for being the first!
Every year, 43% of computer users lose their music, photos, documents, and more. I do not want to be one of them. And neither do you.
My Cannot-Live-Without-It-Tool
For this reason, my cannot-live-without-it tool is an online backup application called Carbonite. Who wants to spend time in techno-stress hell? Nobody that I know — least of all me!
Even if all you’ve done is upgraded to a new computer, populating it with all your files needs to be effortless. Although, once you’ve got this nifty tool in place you don’t have to worry about computer crashes, system hacks or even the dreaded “user error” (as in I can’t believe I deleted that) any more!
Carbonite installs a small application on your computer that works quietly in the background looking for new and changed files that need to be backed up. It looks and feels just like part of your computer and is integrated with your operating system — there is no new interface to learn. It’s completely automatic, secure and encrypted to protect your privacy and, should you ever need to, you can get all your files back with just a few clicks. You can access your backup from any computer or smart phone too.
Why would you use it? Because your life is on your computer.
Take it for a test drive. Carbonite charges a flat fee of $55.00 per year for unlimited backups. Let it protect you from:
- accidental deletion (43% of folks lose irreplaceable files every year),
- theft (only 3 in 100 stolen laptops are ever recovered),
- disaster (thousands of files are lost to fire, flood and other disasters), and
- drive failure (up to 13% of hard drives crash in their first year).
Your business might still keep you awake nights, but at least it’ll be there for you in the morning!
About Our Guest Blogger
Internationally renowned strategist and management consultant, Linda M. Lopeke, is the creator of the award-winning SMARTSTART Business Success program. Learn how you can work with her and take your business from idea to media-worthy success story at www.smartstartcoach.com.
Matt,
Backing up is key I agree. I’ve started using Backup Buddy to backup my WordPress blogs. It’s really a secondary backup since the servers are imaged each night anyway. What I like is I can send the Backup Buddy backups to Amazon S3 so even if my provider gets hacked in a big time way I could get my site back up and running in not time!
Everything needs to be backed up and some things 2 and 3 times in different places depending how critical that material is to your business.
Jim
Jim,
I’ll have to give Backup Buddy a look. Right now, I do WordPress backups manually myself and the server is backed-up nightly, but I like the idea of storing over at Amazon.
Yep – data is the key to any business these days and nothing is worse than experiencing the loss of data and slapping your head while whispering, “I always thought I’d have time to get that backup solution in place!” 🙂