You are sitting in a meeting and all is well until somebody spills the entire contents of the water jug on your notebook computer!

 

Yes, maybe this has not happened to you yet but we all know someone or have heard of someone that lost all their data because of some unfortunate incident. 

 

The most memorable incident I remember was sitting in a restaurant with a lovely stream running behind the tables on one side. My friend was sitting along the water's edge and we were all having fun until somebody noticed that her purse was floating downstream upside down. We don't know really how long the purse was doing its impression of an overturned canoe, but it was at least a couple of minutes and despite the implications to her electronics and makeup it looked funny! 

 

Her mobile phone and camera had sunk to the bottom of the pool like the Titanic. Nothing would bring them back to life and the data they stored was lost forever. That was an expensive lunch as she had several hundred contacts and potential future customers whose contact information was lost that day.

 

Still, it is one thing to lose data when we are at home. Hopefully you have been doing your backups and can get access to them quite readily. Despite the time that must be invested in getting a new computer set-up, at least the data is not lost.

 

But what happens when you are on the road, travelling and have a problem?

 

I've noticed that too many people rely on USB memory sticks for their backups and maybe even for when they are road warriors. While these little devices are quite stable, they are not suitable as your only backup for critical backups despite what the marketing copy says on the shrink wrap. They can and do fail. Don't make a USB stick your only backup.

 

Here is a little known tip. Most people are not aware that they could be using their own website host for a secure location for backup files. You can probably log in to your own website and have in place a secure location for files that only you can see. Any time you have Internet access you can save and backup the files on your local drive.

 

Make sure it is set up right, or you will be sharing your customer data with the world. Like most things technical, details matter.