External hard drive space and cloud storage have become so inexpensive we no longer have any excuse not to have multiple backups of our digital content to protect all of our devices—computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. Think of the many hours you invest at your company in gathering client data, developing amazing creative solutions, conducting online research, finalizing that perfect proposal or even just preserving your photos from a family vacation. Now, imagine all of that work is gone in an instant due to a computer crash. Think of the hours of billable time that would be lost in trying to recreate what was lost.

I recently had one of my computer hard drives fail. I had backed it up onto external storage drive—but that one failed too. Thankfully, I had a third backup in the cloud and all of my data was saved. It’s not as simple as just connecting your computer to an external hard drive, or with Apple, turning on Time Machine, and initiating a backup. You also need to periodically check your backups and the integrity of the drives you are using. Another great, cost-effective and convenient solution is to subscribe to a cloud computing backup service.