Don’t lose your entire Internet business overnight!

Maybe this time I’ll learn.

I’ve made this mistake over and over again during my years of marketing and running businesses online. Which has caused my websites, business AND income to come to a dead stop overnight. You’d think I’d learn.

What am I talking about?

Not backing up my websites, content, programs, folders and software on my local computer I use in my online businesses. I’ve kicked myself, pulled my hair out and screamed a lot over the years when this has happened. And, I always say I’m going to make SURE I start backing everything on my computer up, after I spend days or weeks getting everything up and running again.

Sometimes I wasn’t able to reload software and had to purchase it again.

But guess what?

It happened to me again last week. Am I a glutton for punishment?

My hard drive was developing errors on it and my computer wasn’t running as it should. I suddenly realized I had not backed up my computer 100% and that it could crash at any time.

I panicked and then tried to do a complete image backup of the hard drive with some software I have on my computer. But I was too late. The backup wasn’t completing, as I was getting disk sector errors and the backup was aborting.

Luckily, I was able to take my computer to a friend of mine who is an excellent repair tech and he was able to pull the operating system partition off of the drive and my main folders I needed.

He then put in a new hard drive, reloaded the OS and folders and after 4 evenings of me getting my programs loaded and things back to the way they are supposed to be, I was good to go. But really. What a waste of time that could have been easily avoided.

This time, I immediately went out and bought a second backup drive to put in my computer and have an “auto backup” scheduled to run once a week and saved to the secondary drive now in my computer.

I cannot stress enough that you systematically and frequently back up your whole computer image.

There is an old saying in the computer world.

“There are people who have had hard drives crash, and those who will.”

Make no mistake. If you don’t have a backup of your system, you will be crushed when your hard drive crashes (and it will) and you may potentially lose everything.

Here are a couple of things I now use:

CARBONITE
This is a cloud based file backup system that continually backs up all of the files from your computer to their servers. As long as you are connected to the Internet, Carbonite is always backing up your files – even as you work on them. They also have an option (for more money) where they will also make an image of your whole drive, so it’s a complete duplicate of your drive.

I have the annual subscription for just the file backup.

TIP: When you purchase a piece of software, always do a “Save as” and save the .exe run file to your computer. Once you run and install the program, copy the .exe run file to a USB flash drive and keep it.

If your computer crashes and you are only having your files backed up, you won’t have any of the programs to open and run the files unless you have the .exe run file. I used to just “run” a new program I’d purchase online and install it, without saving the .exe run file. When my computer crashed, I’d have to try and get the programs again by begging the seller to send it to me again, or I’d have to repurchase the program in some cases.

MACRIUM REFLECT FREE EDITION
This software, which has a free version, will make a complete image backup of your entire hard drive to another drive, a USB, whatever. You can set it up to backup automatically on a regular schedule. I love this software.

Don’t risk losing your business, or being out of commission (and losing money)  for an extended period of time for something that you can prevent!

Get in the habit of backing up your complete computer often.

Until next time,

Lee

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