Last week I had not one, but TWO computer problems! First, my entire memory stick just vanished - it was working perfectly one evening and the next morning, everything was gone! Then, I'd worked on my e-book for two and a half hours and somehow, that got deleted by accident.
I think it was the stress of the first incident but I clearly wasn't thinking clearly.
At least it only took me an hour and a half the second time around! I don't want you to have to do hours of rework on anything so I thought I'd share what I learned from this fiasco and what I'm now going to do! Things I did right 1.
Sent emails to clients with their latest action plans.
2.
Shared my bright ideas and new business planning forms with my accountability partner and fellow coach.
What this meant I could retrieve the latest documents from my email attachments - yay! What I am NOW doing differently 1.
Backing up my data weekly instead of monthly.
I used to do a full back-up only once a month with my end-of-month business activities.
I thought I didn't do very much work over the last month until I couldn't find it all! 2.
Made a separate folder called Week of...
(20th July).
My new week starts on a Saturday, primarily because I have a goals and review session every Friday night.
Any documents I work on during the week now go in that folder so I can do a quick back-up while I have my review session.
3.
Storing any writing projects in multiple locations.
I write okay most of the time but when I'm in "the writing zone" then I write quite nicely and even I can see the difference.
I don't have the luxury of waiting for the "zone" to happen because otherwise nothing would get done, right? And I like to write every day! So now, to avoid losing my "in the zone" work like I did last Friday, I'm going to immediately email the document to another email address or save it in another location on my computer.
I am now all caught up (I think) but please do make sure you don't end up tearing your hair out like I did.