A client of mine shared a common story that I have heard many times. She spent hours entering all her contact information into an electronic device only to have the device die with all the information within it lost forever.
While this may seem to be a good one to blame on the device, the truth is that at higher belt levels, this simply doesn’t happen. Purchasing a reliable system is only one aspect. Much more important is the ability to easily and systematically back up critical information that has been stored.
Recently I read some material on risk management that gave me pause for thought. While it was addressing the issue of a natural disaster, I could see that some of my valuable systems were faulty. I moved into action when I realized that I had quite a few vulnerabilities, including my contact list. This is one of the most important information sources that I maintain, and to lose it completely would be unthinkable. Here is what I do to protect the information:
- My contact list resides on Outlook, which is backed up continuously whenever my computer is idle for more than a few minutes. The server it is backed up to is outside of Jamaica (in case of hurricane).
- I carry a replica of my contact list at all times on my PDA, and it is also backed up automatically on Plaxo.
- I go another step and use the Palm Desktop program as a local backup. And if that weren’t enough, I have a copy on my wife’s computer just to be sure.
In this way it would be quite hard for this key database to be lost entirely – it would take a wild coincidence for it go all bad at the same time.