Back-up Your Files!! | Office/Productivity Tools | Consultant Launch Pad Community Forum

I cannot stress enough the need to back-up your computer files when you establish your consulting practice.  You will find the value of drawing from previous projects and as time goes by historic files become quite valuable.  When I look back over my many years of consulting and a very diverse range of project experience, I estimate the value of my 300 GB of files at hundreds of thousands of dollars simply because I can use previous project work on new projects without spending precious time redeveloping new content and materials. 

With that amount of value you can justify a LOT of systems for backing up your files.  I back-up two ways:

1.  I have an external hard drive with software that backs-up in real time.  Each change I make to a file mirrors to the external drive.  The software usually comes with the hard drive.  I am currently using a Maxtor drive.

2.  I also back up each night to a service on the Internet("cloud").  This second back-up is critical as it is "off site" and gives a layer of protection in case of an on-site problem such as theft, fire, lightning, etc.  The service I use is Mozy which automatically looks at your files at a specified interval (nightly for me) and uploads any files that have changed since the previous evening.  I have the service set to back-up BOTH my internal and external drive to build in a little redundancy.  An added benefit is that most services also allow you to access the files remotely using a browser – a great tool when traveling with a netbook.  The cost is around $60/yr.