A few weeks ago, in the wake of the gulf oil disaster, I wrote about contingency planning for small businesses. Make sure you have backups of everything, I said, including your hard drive.
I learned about backups the hard way. As the huge Oakland Hills fire raced down the hill towards my apartment, I watched entire houses explode into full flame while I frantically inserted disk after disk to back up the only copy of my unfinished dissertation.
For years since then, I’ve used “SuperDuper” to automatically back up my entire drive every night. So as far as data backups go, I thought I was covered. But when my computer suddenly crashed and died two weeks ago, I discovered I was not. Unbeknownst to me, my backup software had failed a week before. I lost a week’s worth of work.
I was able to obtain another computer in record time by taking the advice of my computer guy, and buying a used workhorse model on craigslist. The seller was even willing to deliver.
However, no sooner had I migrated my data and apps over from the backup, gotten all set up, and done a few days’ work… but this “new” computer died. I lugged it down to the shop, where they diagnosed it as beyond repair.
I bit the bullet and went to the Apple store. Two hours later I walked out with a new iMac. Again, I migrated everything over from the old backup… minus the missing week; also missing the unbacked-up five days’ work I’d done on the craigslist computer.
Apple comes with automatic backup software preinstalled. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the password to my backup drive. And I postponed taking the time to search for it, reasoning that a brand-new computer would surely be OK for a few days while I scrambled to catch up on delayed projects.
Big mistake. Two days later, the brand-new hard drive died.
Apple was wonderful to deal with, and again I left the store with a brand-new computer. And again, I set up anew, and migrated everything over.
Only now I was missing the original week’s work, plus five days’ work on the second computer, plus two irreplaceable days on the first new Mac. That was two solid weeks of my time, zapped.
Am I glad I had a backup, any backup? Absolutely. But the missing work was a giant hassle to recreate, and some of it can never be recaptured. In consequence, clients’ time-critical work was late. A new job bid was late, too, and I haven’t heard back from the client.
So in addition to work, and time, and money, there’s a loss of what I’ll call “perceived professionalism.” Trust. Reliability. Who would you prefer to entrust with your business… someone who recovers instantly and completely from a disaster, or someone who has to scramble around trying to recover crucial information?
So. Can backing up your business really make you richer? Yes, in two ways. First, in avoiding needless loss. Losing time and money that could easily have been saved with a cheap hard drive and some free software is ridiculous and–at least in the case of creative work–potentially even tragic. And needless to say, losing two weeks worth of income in a bad economy could cripple a business. If it happened to you, would it be the tipping point?
Second, in addition to averting loss, there’s the positive impact. It’s a great feeling to have confidence that you’ve done what you can to protect yourself and your clients from the unforeseeable. To know that if the ship hits an iceberg, there are more than enough well-stocked lifeboats at the ready.
It’s not a flashy kind of confidence, though. It’s more foundational. It infuses you with serenity. It’s a peace of mind that communicates itself wordlessly to your clients, and contributes positively to your professionalism.
And that’s good for business.
There are two primary styles of mainstream bloggers: conduits, and originators. Conduits help digest, funnel and channel helpful information. Originators come up with new thoughts, observations, perspectives and points of view. It’s far less risky to be a conduit. Sure, it takes work seeking out and filtering information. But sharing information that’s been created by others doesn’t require you to put your ego, your self, your opinions and thought processes on the line like being an originator does.
