Setting Up Your Consulting Practice

Protect your client information and make sure that you’ve backed up your files. If we rely on ourselves to manually do that, we know it’s not gonna work.  So, I recommend that you use an automatic backup software, such as Dropbox or Box.net  if you’re using Apple, iCloud. And also, have a physical backup. 

In terms of the automatic backup uh, you may, for example, say, all of the files for this client work are going to be in Box.net and we always save them Box.net. We open them from Box.net and when we make edits, we save it back there. 

I recommend that you make a physical backup of all of your files on an external hard drive and have that external hard drive in a secure place. So, for example, if you have a second home, a vacation home, perhaps you’d store it there. 

Make sure you’re protecting all of your files by backing them up, two separate ways. So to the cloud, pick a backup software service that you feel comfortable with, in terms of its security.  Maybe you pick Dropbox or Box.net or iCloud, but pick at least one, where automatically all of the files you generate are backed up. You don’t want to be in the situation where your laptop gets run over by a car or gets lost or stolen and you can’t produce the client work that you’ve been paid to do. 

So periodically, I suggest you make an external backup to an external hard drive, that you can leave in a secure location. Even if you have backed up your files to the cloud, if you have a significant amount of files, it can take a couple days, sometimes, to download all those files back from the cloud. So you, if you wanna be able to access them in a hurry, have an external backup on a hard drive. You want to protect the work that you’ve done for your clients and make sure it’s accessible to you and that you don’t lose it. So, I recommend that you set up a system so it’s that you’re maintaining a backup to the cloud, as well as to an external hard drive