If you are a writer, you are also the owner of your own business. You need to manage that business well. Part of good business management is to protect your important information.

There are many backup strategies you should use to keep your information safe. Google has many tools to help you accomplish this.

Google Documents is a great way to store files on the Internet. You can access them from any computer with an Internet connection. You can also share the files with others. This is great for editing and critiquing.

Gmail’s default of 7GB of space lets you save lots of documents as well as emails. Because of Google’s great search capability, I had most of my business in my Google accounts. And I was about to max out that 7GB storage.

When my account got hacked, I lost all access to those files and emails. After I convinced Google that I was indeed me, I was able to access my files once more.

All of the Google Docs file was there. However, my drafts, contacts, and inbox had been deleted.

I suspect the hacker wanted plenty of room to store any responses to his request for money in my name. Since he was forwarding all new messages, he received my emails even after access to my account was closed. However, if my account filled up, the emails would bounce back to the sender and would not be forwarded.

The account was my primary PayPal address (a REALLY bad idea). I had made that change a couple of weeks before. (Always direct your PayPal, Clickbank, and other vendor service email to a PAID email account.) My record of payments sent and received were lost. Of course, my PayPal account still contained that information.

My account also contained other business critical information. I rushed around madly trying to reconstruct all the important information I had lost.

Then I remembered a service I started using a couple of months ago, Backupify. It can backup your social network and Gmail messages. I had set it to backup my Gmail box.

When I looked in the archives, all my emails were there. I didn’t want to download all the messages. However, I was able to search through the archives to find the important messages I needed.

I also noticed that they’ve added Gmail contacts to the available backup list. Too bad I didn’t know about that before. It would be handy to be able to restore the contact list.

I posted on Twitter that Backupify had saved my emails. Someone from the company sent me a message to say that if I wanted a zip file of my emails, to ask them. I saw that zip files were on the planning list, but didn’t know they were available yet.

Someone else said they were able to retrieve all their direct messages from Twitter by using Backupify. This company is providing a needed service by backing up social networking files.

Backupify stores your data on the Amazon S3 data cloud. They offer 2GB of storage free and have a couple of paid plans.

Add Backupify to your list of backup providers.

What information would you miss if you lost your social network accounts? Leave me a comment and tell me what important information you can’t afford to lose.

Write on,

Lynn

 

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today I was procrastinating about writing my next article. I went into my secondary email account to clean some things up and see if anything really important had come in.

Because I wasn’t focused on what I should have been doing (or because the universe wanted me to see it, so I could pass this warning along to you), I noticed an advertising email telling me I could make money selling my articles.

I’m always on the lookout for new online (and off line) article sites, so I opened the email.  It had a link to a webpage that gave unrealistic figures for the income you can earn for writing blogs and articles. I quoted REALLY high rates for writing fiction and non-fiction short stories. This pinged the scam alert warning in my brain, but I decided to investigate further.

There was more hype about how you could work as much or as little as you wanted to make the income you chose. AND lucky me, they were having a sale!

Most of their figures were how much you could make per hour. Since no two writers work at the same pace, most projects are measured by words, pages, or complete jobs.

Also, without knowing how well someone writes, making an assumption about income possibilities is impossible.

The normal two week fee was $69. However, right now, and right now only, I could get in for only $2.95. After the two weeks, the cost was ONLY $47 per month.

Later, as I was reading email from my local RWA chapter, I saw that the same company had purchased a Google Adwords ad that showed at the top of the page of my Gmail.

I did some checking online. It seems this company had lots of writers questioning it about a year ago. It also has an affiliate program. That means if you send someone there and they sign up, you get part of the sale.

The Google search results showed an even balance of ads for the sites from the company and the affiliates, and warnings or questions from writers about the company.

Beware of companies that › Continue reading…

 

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

I’ve been having a lot of problems when I try to watch Flash videos on my computer. Sometimes Firefox stops the movie after 2 seconds. Sometimes Firefox and Internet Explorer just close.

It’s been very frustrating. I’ve been blaming the problem on an incompatibility between Flash and Vista.

It turns out that the problem may be with Flash and HP. The same problem seems to happen on HP XP computers as well.

Last week HP sent out an update to try to fix the problem. If you have an XP machine, the update may install as advertised. However, it’s a little more difficult on a computer running Vista.

The upgrade must be run as administrator. Here are the steps for installing the upgrade.

› Continue reading…