In my world as a techie, dealing with website glitches can be a challenge. I was reminded of this last week when a client of mine called to say that his website had mysteriously gone offline, temporarily disappearing into the ethers of the World Wide Web. But the beauty of having these hiccups occur occasionally is that it represents an opportunity to discover new things about technology.

….and about me.

My first (self) discovery was that I have an obsession: It’s called, “Rebel gets a rush of adrenaline from ensuring that the data on our client websites have been properly backed up.” Yep…. this brotha is “backup” OCD to the max about the fifteen or so sites I host and support. Crazily, it’s to the point where voices go off in my head in the middle of dinner prompting me to randomly check to see if the backups have been successfully executed for the week.

So when I received that client call at 8:17 am while still gathering myself from a restful slumber, there appeared to be no need for panic. My first line of action when a website goes down is to contact our preferred hosting company and have them restore it from their backup. Problem is, when I got a hold of them this time, they notified me that 14 minutes before our call, they had overwritten the back up.

TRANSLATED: This means that they no longer had any of the website data and content. None. Zilch…….It was totally gone, nothing I could do or they could do.

Or so I thought….

After a brief moment of anxiety, a sudden flash of recall came to me that brought a wry smile to my face…… that three days ago in the midst of one of my OCD episodes, I had randomly backed up the entire directory of websites to our company servers.

Deep breath….But

Despite being able to salvage the website this time around due to my propensity for doing random backups, I had a blinding flash of the obvious….that it would be wise not to allow my firm as well as the companies we support to fall prey to such a precarious scenario again.

So here was my BIG discovery? There are tech solutions available for a mere $20 bucks a month, that can back up websites routinely without our involvement.

You are probably saying “great discovery” Rebel.

Hold on a minute!

Please keep in mind that as a lowly small business owner I have to consider every dollar I fork out, even if its small. So I began to think about this a bit more.

Currently here at Lebertech we use Google Drive throughout the company, mainly as tool for our team to facilitate the sharing of  files and project information. The more I thought about Google Drive,  it made sense that there had to be a resource, a way for me to back up everything routinely, without my involvement, using this platform.