If you could do one thing that you know would save your business, would you do it? Of course you would. There is such a thing–an easy one, in fact: back up your computer and project drives.
Taking care of your data and your projects should be your number one priority. If you lose your files, you will have angry clients (at best) and you will lose money because you will have to recreate whatever you lost. Remember, time is money.
I just went through this. Over the weekend, my computer died. My trusty MacBook, that has served me so well for the better part of a decade, turned into a brick. We’re talking a power issue—possibly a fried motherboard—who knows. It won’t make so much as a peep or ding, much less actually turn on, despite the various tricks tried by me, Apple, and my tech-savvy brother. It is so dead, that recovering anything from its drive is probably going to require an expert and lots of money.
Dead-dead-dead-y-dead.
The MacBook is dead, long live the new MacBook.
Okay, you get it.
Anyway, I would be so terribly screwed…except that I regularly back up. I’m religious about it and it totally saved me here. Every week, I back up on two separate outside drives plus I have some things backed up to the cloud with every change, too. So, instead of losing a ton of data (like client files…eeek!), I lost very little—like a couple of screenshots, it seems.
So yeah, I’m still out the cost of a new MacBook and my Sunday was all about trying to fix my old one, then getting a new one (thank heavens Apple delivers via courier here!), then doing the migration from one of the drives. Still, I’m up and running, mostly normally, this Monday. Whew.
More importantly, my clients will be virtually unaffected by the failure. That is both a client management issue, like it would be for anyone in any business, and an ethical one for us lawyers (I have a duty to protect my clients’ files/data).
If you are not backing up regularly, start today. Best practice is the 3-2-1 system: three back-ups, on at least 2 separate media (2 different drives, 1 drive + cloud, whatever), and 1 copy kept off-site (the cloud can be this). Then, do it every week at minimum.
A backup plan is just like insurance: we hope we may never need it but, boy howdy, we’re glad it’s there when we do.