Get Rich or Die Trying: Back it Up

Recently, a tragedy befell me that really made me question the transient nature of life, and required me to search the depths of my soul to find the strength to overcome the injustice of this cruel world.  My Facebook was deleted.  Ok, so I may be exaggerating slightly, but losing three thousand contacts on an accidental flick of an over excited administrator’s finger, coupled with the fact that my laptop was at that time performing a swan song and refusing to let me access any of my files or get online, for a few days at least, I was well and truly stranded in the e-wilderness.  (You don’t know how much you’ll miss social networking with people you haven’t seen since you were four, the friend of that guy who used to date your sister’s gay hairdresser’s uncle, and the local milkman until they’re gone.)  Thankfully, I’m now ‘back on the technology train,’ as the editor of Trespass succinctly commented on the situation, but being the resourceful writer that I am, I decided to turn this temporary hardship into an example of how to avoid the same fate for yourself.  Heed my warnings, or kick yourself at leisure.

• Use separate memory sticks just for your important business documents, portfolios, etc, and invest in an external hard drive.
• Upload your images to storage sites such as Flickr and Photobucket.
• Upload important mp3s to somewhere such as Fileden.
• Regularly print hard copies of your online press coverage, work, and even important emails so that in the worst case scenario, you will at least have some evidence of your former sparkling electronic career.
• Your Blackberry or phone will die at some point, possibly when you need it most, as dictated by Sod’s Law. Keep a real life address book with numbers, addresses and web site urls. Archaic I know. You can even use a pen. Remember them?
• Regularly export your contacts from your email and mailing list providers.
• When using social networking sites, take five minutes to review the site’s terms and conditions, to avoid conducting yourself in a manner that risks deletion. Your main focus will be on self promotion and advertising, so be familiar with their policies on these. If you do think you’ve been accidently deleted, contact the site admins immediately from the email address with which you registered, and wait until you hear back before you start again from scratch.
• Encourage people to add you across all of your social networking outlets. Then, if you are deleted from one, you can still contact and update them elsewhere.
• Make a trustworthy friend an admin for your Facebook fan pages and groups. Choose someone with little to no interest in the every day running of your business, and make it clear that you are asking them to take a passive, emergency only role.
• If you operate on Myspace, and have built up a substantial friend’s list, create a back-up account, and ask people to re-add you there. Be aware that only a small percentage is likely to oblige, so the responsibility should be on you to request them from the secondary account. This can be well worth the effort if you do it in small stages, or offload the task to an intern or local simpleton.