Emoms at Home had a post today called, Recovering from Data Loss in Your Home Business.

From Wendy’s post:

I’m kind of freaking out right now because I believe that my laptop has died. As in, I can’t even turn it on. I’m using my daughter’s computer for now, which is a short-term solution for the bigger problem of losing the one thing that is critical to my doing business. All the woulda-coulda-shoulda’s are echoing through my brain right now, with the most ironic one of all being that a company offered me a computer backup system for review purposes just last week and I hadn’t gotten back to them yet.

While I can relate to Wendy’s problems and I can certainly appreciate it too. I have to say, I have not had such problems since I moved to the Mac OS almost 4 years ago.

However, knowing that even the BEST operating system and hardware can crap out on you, I use a lot of safe guards to protect my data. Here is how I have equipped my office to deal with all the possibilities.

First of all, and I will keep mentioning this until such time as everyone of you use the Apple computer. It is really what I consider my first stage of defense against problems experienced by my windoze using friends.

But, as I mentioned, I know there can be problems. So, I use both hardware and software to protect, maintain and backup my “stuff”. Wendy mentioned that she did not have all of her emails archived on another device. I use a great program to archive my emails called. Mailsteward. It is wonderful. I set it to do a complete archive of my email on a daily basis. I also set it to do this at 10:00 p.m. each and every night and it does it without any further effort on my part. It places the emails in archive folders I have placed on my “desktop” and I than do a backup of those to my external HD. I always have a daily backup of all of my emails. I and others like me live and die by email. We do most of our communications with clients/customers, vendors, and others via email. I have to have archives of all my emails and this was the best solution I found. And with Mailsteward ,I can search through the entire archive for any email I might need.

Next is one of the new features in OS 10.5.0 and that is Time Machine. Leopard’s built in backup feature. Also a wonderful piece of software. It simple does a backup of my computer during the day. And if I need something from my computer that might be gone for whatever reason, I go to Time Machine and it is there. Effortless security for all my “stuff”.

I also use a program that manages all of my passwords I might need. 1Password is the program I am using. And best of all, it syncs all those passwords to my iPhone. And, I backup all those passwords to my external hard drive. The main thing 1Password does is give me a one stop shop way of managing all my passwords. It also will generate passwords for you. I use this feature and have it generate at a minimum 15 letters and/or number passwords. Just a little added security.

For all my documents, I not only backup to my external HD, burn to DVD’s and use an old 2nd generation iPod, I also use an online service called, Box.net. And for an added benefit of Box.net, I can access all my client files, including all their documents from my iPhone. And with that, I can email documents to clients or others from Box.net and my iPhone if I need to and don’t have my Macbook with me.

Finally, I use an old Mac Mini as a file backup tool. I backup all my client files and documents to my older Mac Mini. I can also access this from anywhere with either my Macbook or my iPhone. I use a service called, SoonR.

What is great about all of the programs I use is they allow me to access most of the stuff I need from anywhere. And if something, god forbid does happen, I have all my “stuff”. It also works right into my paperless office setup.

Drop me your comments here and let us know what you use to make sure your data is safe.