This post was written by Whitney Kemper, an SMB Specialist in our Vancouver office.

After several years as a commercial real estate broker, I switched to tech and accepted my current position at CRU. I love it here, and one of the things I enjoy is that I get to help my friends re-evaluate how they handle their valuable data.

I recently met up with my former business associate Pammy, a successful mortgage broker. She was one of a few who was smart enough to have survived the housing bubble that burst several years ago. She and I had a long business relationship, and it was nice to see her and catch up.

It didn’t take long for our conversation to turn to business. Mortgages are good again and I love my job in the tech sector. Pammy thinks my turn to tech is somewhat fascinating, as we both decided years ago that our laptops were essentially there just to store our photos and iTunes music. I asked her how she manages this data.

Pammy: “Excel spreadsheets like normal, why is there something easier?” (This is actually the same way I would have answered a year ago.)

ME: (face palm) “No, not just the spreadsheets, I mean all the stuff on your hard drive.”

Pammy: (blank stare; she hates it when she thinks she looks stupid) “How do you manage a hard drive, like save stuff to the server room?”

ME: “Sort of. What do you do when Windows tells you it’s time to back up your system?”

Pammy: “Easy. Hit ‘remind me later.’”

ME: “What would you do if your laptop crashed?”

Pammy: “Um, download the stuff from my cloud service.”

ME: “How much stuff is up there.”

Pammy: “I don’t know.”

ME: “Is it backed up anywhere else?”

Like many of us, Pammy uploads her data to a cloud backup service, and that’s the only backup she has.

Her business, just like everyone’s, is dependent upon her client contacts, service agreements, databases, photos, etc. Losing that data would be a severe blow to her business. Heck, even losing the ability to get at that data for more than a day or two would hit her on payday–hard.

That’s why I like to tell my business associates, friends, and family, that the cloud is a great option. But it’s not the full solution. You need to also have multiple copies of your data, on separate hard drives, and you also need to have one of those drives in a secure, offsite location. Away from your office. Like at a safe deposit box. That way, if you lose all your data, you can retrieve one of your hard backups, install it, and get back to business quickly.

I would be happy to have this conversation with you. Losing your stuff is no fun, and I can help you prevent that from happening.