Do You Have A Contingency Plan?
Greetings readers, I hope you have had a nice Easter Break. Mine was perfect until I decided to watch England Vs Australia in the cricket. England might have a decent chance of winning the world cup if half the team weren’t scared of hitting a cricket ball!
But enough about cricket, I would like to welcome the new readers to this weeks newsletter. Most weeks I will publish a free newsletter on my blog on a number of different subjects, you can view my archived newsletters and navigate the site via the links on the right of the page.
This week I am going to look at an important part of any online or offline business – a contingency plan!
Put simply, have you got measures in place for when something goes wrong?
The reason for me writing about this subject is due to something that happened to me just before the Easter break. I woke up one morning to discover that I had no broadband connection, so I couldn’t check my emails, access websites and respond to customer queries.
After a chat with my ISP they assured me that my line was fine and it wasn’t a problem at their end either. After a lot of searching around I found out that the problem was actually my router, so off to the local store I went. £70 and one new router later I was back online, however all of the searching around for the problem had cost me two days of working time, not to mention the backlog of emails.
So that was 2 days without an Internet connection, what could I have done to avoid this?
The answer was staring at me in the face; I should have had a contingency plan in place! In this case my contingency plan would be to have a dial up connection to fall back on if my broadband decided to kick up a fuss again. So the very first thing I did when I was back online was find a dial up solution.
I found this emergency dial up number that you can use (UK only) but I’m sure if you look on Google you will be able to find your countries equivalent service – if you can’t find one maybe there is a gap in the market 😉
http://emergencyinternet.com/ (not an affiliate link!)
Having a dial up connection in place before my Broadband crash would have meant I could still answer emails and customer queries, all be it a bit slower than before but they would still be answered and I wouldn’t have faced the back log that I did.
So contingency plan 1:
Always have a dial up connection to fall back on if your Broadband fails. (and never buy a Belkin router, they break way too easily!)
Number 2 isn’t something that has happened to me yet, touch wood but I’m sure you will all be aware of a massive problem that could cause you no end of headaches.
What would you do if your hard drive crashed and you lost all of your data? Every website you ever created, every e-book you ever downloaded, every letter you ever composed; every picture you saved would be gone for good.
This may sound a little bit far fetched, but trust me it isn’t. A hard drive can go at any time, what’s to say you won’t get a computer virus tomorrow and have to reformat everything?
I can’t stress how important it is to have a contingency plan in place for this, you need to make sure that you make backs of all your important data on a regular basis. There are loads of ways to back up:
– Copy all files to an external drive
– Copy files to a DVD/CD
– Upload important files to your server
– Use an automated online back up system
I personally use an automated online back up system, every time I create or change a file/folder the software automatically makes an off site backup for me. I use:
www.carbonite.com (again, it’s not an affiliate link)
So contingency Plan 2:
Always back up your important files and folders, you never know when you hard drive will decide to call it a day 🙂
Those are the two main points that I wanted to make today, there are other contingency plans that you also need to consider but I felt that those were the two main one’s for now.
Others to consider would be:
– A back up hosting account if your current host goes belly up
– Details of all your business accounts, paypal passwords if something were to happen to you. Hey, I know it’s morbid but it’s something you need to consider, if something were to happen to you then you need a plan in place that would give your loved one’s the information they need.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter, I normally end by asking you to leave me any comments you may have on the article, but this week I will be ending on a rather sombre note.
A long time marketer by the name of Gary Halbert has sadly passed away. I was a long time subscriber to Gary’s newsletter as I’m sure a lot of you were as well. I’m sure you will join me in sending out our thoughts and prayers to Gary’s family.
Thanks for reading,
Regards,
Dan
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Sad Times 🙁
Sorry to hear about Gary. You are right about backing up your pc. I have lost 2 pc’s and I didn’t have any thing to fall back on. I lost everything. This time I have been putting everything on dvd’s and boy do I have a stack of them. You have a great day…Jude
I’m lucky in that my PC has yet to crash but I know a lot of people that have lost everything due to a hard drive failure. My main PC is close to 4 years old now so it’s a miracle that it hasn’t happened. At least when it does I will have a back up 🙂