When you work within a company, you have other employees and access to IT professionals to help you if your computer crashes or if you were to somehow lose your data. If you're self-employed, the recovery job falls on you. You might not have a full server backup of all of the work that you've done or the work you were in the process of doing. Sometimes it can take you a while to bounce back from a loss of data, and that's time you can't afford to lose. If you're a freelancer, you'll want to establish a sound backup strategy early on in your one-person business venture. You can learn more here.
What You Should Backup
If you get backup software with limited storage, you'll want to think carefully about what you backup in order to fully maximize the space that you have. Freelancers should save their business emails and correspondences, Internet bookmarks that were used on past projects, current work, spreadsheets, invoices and expense sheets. If you're a freelance photographer or graphic designer, make sure that the backup software has enough space to handle high definition images, videos and large projects.
It's best that you backup everything that you've done from your first client five years ago to the client that you just landed five minutes ago. While this might seem like a waste of space, there's a chance that one of your old clients could lose the work that you did for them. When they email you to see if you happen to have a copy, you can gladly tell them that you do. Not only does this make you look more professional, it's also a good way to snag another job when they remember what good work you do and what a professional you are.
Backup Your Backups
Just as regular businesses like to have two or three different server backups, you might want to think about following in their digital footsteps. Imagine how maddening it will be to lose data or have your computer crash only to learn that the location where your backup data is stored was washed away in a flood or devastated by a fire. By making backups of your backups you stand a better chance of making sure that your data is truly secure.
Something else that you'll want to do is test your backups. After your first backup session, make sure that you can quickly and easily access the backup on your computer, smartphone and/or tablet. Again, this might sound like a lot of work and possibly even overkill, but you'll want to account for every contingency. If you ever do need to use your backups, you'll want to be able to transition to them with ease so that your business productivity doesn't lag as a result, which you'll undoubtedly appreciate should disaster strike in the middle of one of your biggest projects yet.
With the way that technology is changing and the number of new and affordable opportunities there are out there, there's no reason that freelancers shouldn't have access to the same or similar resources as regular businesses. Backing up your work is backing up your sanity as well as your reputation.
