On my way back from speaking at Triple Play (the New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania Association of Realtors Annual Conference), I had a catastrophic fail on my computer. Apple looked at it, said they couldn’t resurrect it, and gave me the card for a company that might be able to restore my hard drive and save my data (it could cost up to a $1,000 or more).

What would you do if this happened to you? I have my articles backed up on a site called Authory, some of my most important data on my Macbook Air that I bought for travel, but my videos, training power points, and audios are not on that device due to its limited storage capacity.

I used to back things up on a hard drive, but they didn’t work with the Thunderbolt C computers, so I stopped doing it.

I walked out from Apple having to wait until the end of 2023 to get a new Macbook Pro and a hard drive to back up my files in the future. I’m still up and running with my Macbook Air, so you’re at least getting a newsletter this week.

The good news was that I have been paying for BackBlaze. When I logged on to their site, all the files I needed were there—it was over one terabyte of data (1,000,000 megabytes). I could download individual files as I need them and they had a zip drive solution, but I had way too much data to retrieve using any of those options.

I was happily surprised to find that they could send me a hard drive for $189.00 plus tax with all my data. Best of all, once I downloaded it, I could keep the drive or return it to them for a refund.

If you’re not subscribed to an online backup system, you need to do so NOW. You never know when a small problem can wipe out your contacts and all your other important data.

Also, get in the habit of backing up your device on an external drive at least weekly, because even the best cloud backups don’t always work 100 percent of the time. This is incredibly important if you’re now using videos or audio podcasts in your marketing because they take up so much space.

It’s a pain to get everything transferred and a new computer set up, but not nearly the disaster it would have been for me without BackBlaze.