Have you ever looked up a quote for “redundancy”?  I just did, and 95% of them are negative.  Redundancy is a word that big corporations often use as an excuse to lay people off or cut something out.  But yesterday I got a big fat reminder of why there is one place in our businesses we can’t afford NOT to have redundancy — when it comes to ensuring the collection and backup of our intellectual property.

Whoa, that sounds awfully dry — no painfully-thought-out copy to suck you in and get you to pay attention.  So allow me to tell you a quick story that could save your bacon.

Yesterday one of the admins that works with me said, with strain in her voice said…  “Um, you know that really important teleconference this morning?  Well, there doesn’t…. um… I don’t think…. gee, there’s no recording.”  WHAT?  THERE’S NO RECORDING?  I went into firefighter mode and scrambled to find out who had scheduled the teleconference, if the call had been setup properly with the service, and if there was any chance of a backup being in place.

Now, mind you, I DID set up a backup recording system for the client, but she simply stopped using it — much to my chagrin.  But now I was panicked.  What to do? I fired off an email to the conference service — do you have a way to tell if the call was set up properly, so that I can put additional safeguards in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again?  And then… the email to the client, apologizing profusely and assuring her that I would do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.

As I’m sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, an email catches my attention.  “Conference Call Recap….. x people on the call…. recording being processed.”  Did I see that right?  Recording being processed?  Suddenly there was hope.  Typically the service has the recordings ready within a few minutes, and several hours had passed.  So I immediately jumped to the conclusion that a mistake had been made.  Fortunately, I was wrong. For some reason the processing time was twice as long as normal — and there was a recording after all.  No mistake had been made.  But that’s not the lesson here.  Systems. Redundancy. Backup Plans.  That’s the point.

Don’t neglect this part of your business.  You need at least 2 backups of your data at all times.  For your computer, that should be in the form of an external hard drive PLUS a secure online service, so that you are 100% protected.  And for your information products — eBooks, audios, documents, videos, etc. there should always always ALWAYS be 2 copies.  Don’t compromise — or you could lose the very thing that keeps your business going.

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