Make Year 2012 The Year of The Back Up

As we reach the year 2012, it is very obvious that we have become a technology driven society.  More and more people are using technologies for every aspect of their life. The real estate industry is rapidly moving down the technology road. Fewer and fewer people are using the “old” methods to locate properties or agents.

Instead of driving to the local brokerage office, which still does happen, more and more real estate customers are using technology to fulfill their real estate needs. Text messaging, interactive phone systems, smart phones and computers are the new tools of buyers, sellers and investors.

Technology for all its good points has its drawbacks. Technological items like computers and smart phones are susceptible to failure. Failure can come in many forms. Impact (dropping), liquid (spills/submersions), loss/theft and so on. No matter how the damage or event occurs, there is always the aftermath to deal with.  

The reason this article relates to real estate is just because I’m a Realtor in Mesa Arizona. And my story is this: It happened again to one of my clients. In this case he lost his smart phone at a group event. He has phone insurance so the new phone will cost him $150 instead of $600 for the deductable. It was only a couple of months old and the vendor did not have any in stock. So it will be more than a week for him to get a replacement phone.

I asked him about the data? He does not think he has a current backup of recent contact, appointments or e-mails. This is not a rare event. I have had several clients this year who have lost, broken or had stolen a smart phone. At least 3 people that I can think of and there may be more. Every now and then I get a response to a text message: “who is this? I had to get a new phone and lost all my contacts”

This last year, 2011, was not kind to me technologically. The outcome of my events has been relatively low impact. I upgraded from a Blackberry to a smart phone this year and because I had good data backups, I was able to get all my data moved except my calendar events. I had a major event that occurred a few months ago when I lost a hard drive on my server. Though it took several hours to repair and restore, we only lost about 2 months of one of my assistance e-mail. That was caused by a breakdown in backup protocol for that one computer.

My data backups were tested again last night when the laptop I use for my daily real estate business has a hard drive failure. The laptop is only 8 month old so this was unexpected. Fortunately I still had my previous laptop computer and was able to restore all data from backups.

I know that the event I experience was not that uncommon. For individuals and small business people, most don’t have the resources to hire an IT company to manage their computers and backups but there are a few simple things you can do to protect yourself next year:
For computers – use an online backup system. You can type online backup into any search engine and find several options. You can create simple backups with a computer to computer syncing system. The one I use is Goodsync. Or you can spend some money on a backup drive and backup software.
For phones – Check with your phone vendor. Blackberry has their own backup application. My new smart- phone is Google active and backs up to Google Calendar and Contacts.

It is my hope that my customers and readers find this advice useful and take this opportunity and resolved to Make 2012 a Happy New Year... protect your DATA