Last week my friend knocked over a cup of coffee into his laptop and totally ruined the machine. Which leads me to remember something similar that happened to me one time.

I often wonder why people don’t ‘protect’ their internet marketing business better? If you were running a bricks and mortar business you would have the building and contents of your business insured, right?

That’s something I learned the hard way when I first started online marketing.

So, there I was busy pounding away on the PC feeling great about building my online business when suddenly WHAMM…

The PC hard drive failed and everything STOPPED and I was looking at the blue screen of death!

The cheap hard drive installed in the PC seized to respond and crashed, only to crash my entire business along with it. Yes I could easily access my eBay accounts, websites and blogs from another computer but all the precious data, images, bookmarks, tools, software, and files were gone forever.

I did eventually get all my passwords back that I had stored on the hard drive, but I was still entering my email address in the ‘recover your password’ forms for months to come. I also did have an external hard drive that I used to backup my data once in a while but I only backed up maybe every 6 months or so. I lost 6 months of files I had stored and lots of TIME!

You can imagine the nightmare of the blue screen of death!

So I now use 2 tools that prevent such a disaster ever happening again and they are..

1. Roboform

I can’t imagine being without this tool. Every time I need to login to a website I simply hover the Roboform link installed in my web browser and Roboform shows me all the websites that I have login information stored. I click the website I want to login to and Roboform automatically logs me in. I don’t have to remember the login details and it even stores my address details to fill sign up forms. It saves me so much time and it’s security protected. Oh, and there’s  a 30 day free trial to test it out.

The second one is..

2. GoodSync

If I had used this tool BEFORE my hard drive died I would have saved so much time not having to recover important information (some of which I will never get back). It’s like the ‘It will never happen to me’ lie we all fool ourselves with until after the disastrous event. Using GoodSync, in 2 clicks I can now backup any important files and synchronize between my PC, laptop, server, external drive and phone.

These are the tools that stop me guessing if and when the next blue screen of death will appear, not to mention the amount of time saved trying to recover and remember passwords.

If you have lots of time spare and don’t have important documents on your laptop there’s no need to know about these tools. Or like my friend, if you don’t mind pouring coffee into your laptop and losing everything!