In the early days of the internet and word processing there was an adage used “Save early and often”. Before the days of autosave, I fell victim several times to forgetting to save. I would get to the bottom of a lengthy document only to hit a button accidentally and lose, sometimes, hours of work. That taught me to hit save regularly.
For accounting, I use Quickbooks. I have learned to save regularly, because I did not want to pull out all of the paper documents to recreate the digital file.
Recently, my hard-drive crashed unexpectedly. Guess what? I had not performed a backup for 
a rather lengthy period of time. Fortunately, my IT angel Trish, was able to retrieve the documents so I will not have to begin from scratch.
What this brought to mind is:
- Security
- Options
Security – how secure is your system? When was the last time you backed up your files? How often do you back-up? Where do you keep your back-up? Do you have redundant back-up?
Options – While writing this article, I performed a search for on-line back-up and got a link to a 
review of 26 systems. I will be implementing one of these back-up systems. The next question becomes if you store data in GoogleDrive, or SkyDrive (who came up with the Drive name first?) or Adobe’s Creative Cloud Connection, how secure are the files in those cloud drives? Small business can be devastated if they haven’t secured their file servers and something crashes. Even if you are saving things with services like Box or Drive you could run into a breach of some sort. Look at the recent hack into Evernote. Today the options are varied and numerous. You may employ one or more currently and you may not, but I urge each of you to think about your schedule and how frequently you are backing up your data, and whether it is automatic or manual.
What is your favorite method to protect your data?
