What’s your back up plan?

It’s good to be home after a very lovely vacation in Thailand and Bali.  Comparing the two makes it easy for me to say I adore Bali and the Balinese people.   They were extremely friendly, helpful, and warm.  There was a real sense of pride in their villages, a feeling of caring for others and of working together for the good of the whole.

In our five days in Bali, we toured many of the historical and tourist sites and ventured off the beaten path to dine with the locals, where we enjoyed a great $4 dinner for two.  I asked our driver, yes, driver, because for less than $40, you can hire someone for the day, about crime and he said it was very, very low, almost unheard of.   He said, “Balinese people care about the well-being of one another and help each other out when needed.”  I really like that!

Please don’t get me wrong, they weren’t sitting around doing anything, they were busy working, and there was plenty of commerce happening, shops and restaurants with many visitors happily spending money.  Each person I encountered when shopping was helpful and friendly and offered more than simply the exchange of an item for cash.  I really like that way of doing business and the feeling of being of value to others, offering something far more than the money received for the service or product and leaving them feeling better for the experience.  It’s something that our team strives for with each and every person on all sides of the transaction that we work with.

Sadly for me, while in Bali, my laptop decided to quit working.  While typing away on an article, it went blank and hasn’t returned.  Most of my business runs in the cloud, and our CRM program, our emails, and our file management program track our client’s deals, so I knew it wasn’t the end of the world, but I was sad that many of the things I’d written, music I’d purchased and marketing pieces might have been lost.

For almost two weeks, I worried about the content and my ability to recapture it.  I’d recently done sync with my PC but hadn’t double-checked it in my rush to get everything else finalized before vacation.  When I returned, I realized that it didn’t work.

Thankful for me, the computer tech was able to copy all my data, photos, and music onto an external hard drive which is now on my PC.  Unfortunately, my laptop is now nothing more than a door stop as it overheated and blew the video chip, which is attached to the motherboard and is not cost-effective to fix.  Ouch!!

Here’s my lesson: For less than the cost of paying someone to extract my data, I could have subscribed to an online service that automatically backs up my data daily.   I’d used such a service in the past but didn’t renew for some senseless reason that I can’t recall.  Needless to say, I’m back now with Mozy and happy knowing that if this computer should decide to leave this world, I’ve got all my data, and I can easily rebuild my files with a few clicks of the mouse.

It doesn’t take a vacation or really much of anything else to lose your data, computers just quit working sometimes, and data gets lost.  It’s all too easy for a computer to crash, and the potential of losing data is high. Take a moment soon to evaluate your current backup plan (system) and ensure you’re covered.  The peace of mind will be well worth the small price for backing up your data.  If you don’t have a current system, check out Mozy, it’s inexpensive and easy to use, and there is even a free version for those with “light data” needs.