Hopefully, I’ve made a case for why you need to have your data backed up. It won’t make you productive on its own, but for almost zero effort, it will help prevent a productivity catastrophe. So I like to think of backup as productivity insurance.

If your laptop was stolen out of your trunk, would you lose anything? Sure, you can replace a device, but usually, what is on the device is the most valuable thing. After all, can you get your most important work done faster with a backed-up PC? Are you more likely to achieve your goals if your data is safe?īoth of those are debatable, but I think of it from the other way - is there anything less productive than being half-way through a project and losing an important file? Most of us don’t think of backing up our data as productivity-related. A few clicks and a few minutes later, and my entire document tree, which was backed up as of 20 minutes earlier, was back where it was supposed to be, and I was finally able to access the document that started this whole thing. How am I supposed to live vicariously through my kids if they are going to make passes like that?)

(That honor goes to my son’s soccer tryout that evening.

The funny thing is, that wasn’t close to the most stressful part of that day. All my invoices, all my bills, all my important documents, were gone.

Somehow, someway, I had accidentally deleted my entire electronic filing cabinet. “Hm, that’s strange,” I thought, “maybe it’s a search problem.” So I did as our forefathers did and manually went to the folder where I store my documents. So I did what I always do: used the keyboard to fire up Alfred, typed part of the filename, and searched. A few years ago, there was a document I needed to access.

Idrive clone computer backup