Cloud Data Location Redundancy
I can’t stress enough the importance of backing up your cloud data and implementing 3-location redundancy.
“Redundancy for the sake of redundancy” was my salvation.
In 2005 my business was in a building that suffered a fire, and it burned to the ground.
I was already on my way to internet-based file management, but more importantly, I was practicing 3 location data redundancy.
It was my saving grace for having my business up and running the next day, and client files intact.
At the time I had a branding and marketing biz. I was charged with being the gatekeeper for very sensitive, expensive, hard-to-recreate content files. My clients were mainly financial sector companies, who had to adhere to strict securities commission compliance regulations, so the work I did with them was driven by tight timelines (sound familiar?).
This meant not only did I have “pretty” graphic files under my charge, but I had time-sensitive ones too. There was no luxury of losing days to a data crisis.
My redundancy looked like this:
All completed files were sent by FTP to the client as well as stored on external hard drives and copied to CDs
The hard drives and CDs did not shack up together - they lived in different places, neither of which was my office
All WIP was backed up to an external hard drive, and was dumped to a CD at the end of each day
The hard drive stayed in my car at night and the CD hung out in my briefcase, which came into my home with me each evening
Do I sound a little nuts about redundancy with all my crazy protocols?
Well here’s what happened the night of the fire - on Friday May the 13th no less.
We were heading out for a friend’s birthday dinner and at the last minute we decided to take my car
I put my briefcase back in my office to make a little extra room
I didn’t go back and retrieve it after dinner - this is literally the single time that my CDs and my computer had a sleepover
And whamo - two of my locations, the computer and the CDs were gone
Hell’s hallelujah for my external hard drive which was under the front seat of my car. The new Mac I ordered would take a few days to arrive, but the next day I was back up and running on my laptop.
My client files were intact and I was saved a world of grief (and money).
If anyone is wondering, my accounting files were on my accountant’s system and he had my April paperwork. Every shred of my meticulously filed bits of paper source docs and business records burned up though.
And my briefcase, which I loved - that was gone too :-{
Of course, now digital documentation and file storage is much, much more efficient and accessible.
As you can imagine, I couldn’t adopt cloud soon enough, but it was a few years away.
Time Machine became my new backup bestie in 2007.
I adopted Dropbox - for file management & sharing. And FreshBooks in 2009 - can you say pretty invoices on a Mac, not in Word.
Of course, I was joyous about iCloud backup when it came into being in 2011.
I became a security and backup evangelist once I fired up (ironic choice of words…) my bookkeeping business in 2011.
Every new client got a security and backup audit (no one passed, btw)
Everyone got a lesson on switching to IMAP based email
Everyone was introduced to Dropbox
In 2012 my girlfriend Melanie, a fellow bookkeeper, introduced me to the magic of Dropbox as a virtual C-Drive. This was amazing because then even desktop-based program data - like say, Quickbooks - could live and be shared “on the cloud”. I later moved to QBox but I will always look back on Dropbox as the program that completely virtualized my bookkeeping world.
Also in 2012, I mucked about in Quickbooks Online and Xero. Because I was already Intuit based I ultimately chose QBO to run my branding business (I was still running the branding biz alongside my bookkeeping one) and although it was UGLY I knew it was going to change the accounting world and I was all in on that. Shortly thereafter along came the Intuit app ecosystem and by 2014 my clients and I were done and dusted with paper.
We had new redundancy protocols and they were super slick and seamless for security, data redundancy and real-time collaboration.
Except for one thing - a true backup of QBO data.
Which made me twitchy.
I integrated SafetyNet with QBO, but I never understood it. I did test drive it on my playground file and it seemed to restore most of the data, most of the time, but it was cumbersome and awkward. And sooooo not pretty (UX/UI matters…).
And then along came Rewind QBO Backups.
My cloud world was completed
Not only were individual QBO files being backed up and could be returned to a point in time, they could be restored on a transactional level
Boom!!
What’s in my backup tech stack?
Rewind for QBO files - clients’ and my own
CloudHQ for my Google Workspace apps - including email
Dropbox for the CloudHQ backups to be hosted
An external hard drive for - ah, actually nope - nothing lives on my computer, I’m completely cloud-based…
What are my main location redundancy protocols?
Accounting
Dext publishes to QBO
All QBO A/R is BCC’d to Dext
A custom backup report group (GL, AR, AP, Trial Balance) is auto-emailed monthly to Dext, as a single PDF
A custom report of the GL is auto-emailed to an alias I have set up, as an Excel file
All documents from Dext are all automagically downloaded to client-controlled cloud folders
QBO is backed up by Rewind, including attachments
Business
Google Workspace (all app files, drive contents and email) are syncing in real-time to Dropbox
All Google Chrome “People” are syncing to a corresponding Google account
My website back up system looks like this
Pages copied/pasted to Docs
Blogs are converted to email campaigns, and when one is sent, it goes into a folder in my Gmail (which is backed up by CloudHq as mentioned above)
Items are set up and updated in an Airtable base
I occasionally make a duplicate site of my site
This is a new feature in Squarespace, and some code doesn’t come over, but at least the majority of my site will be recoverable
Engagement contracts are PDF’d to my Google drive
All my in-app workflows exist as spreadsheets, they are not just in the proprietary software
Contact information is shipped around to my scheduler, my workflow app Financial Cents, QBO and my CRM 17Hats//referrals.17hats.com as well as a “single source of truth” spreadsheet
There’s a zap for that…
A final story of why I believe so passionately in a backup system.
I had a website that I created in WordPress and it was a beastly build. It was a robust site and I loved it.
I had a backup in place using a WordPress plugin and my host company had a scheduled backup process
I copied pages into Docs and blog posts originated in Docs - safely homed in a Goggle Drive folder in spite of my two independent backups
My media files were also redundantly stored in a Google folder
My site got highjacked and my site along with both my backups were decimated.
But I had all the copy, page structure and media to have someone rebuild most of it right away.
The lesson on this is not just data location redundancy but 2 Factor Authorization - which I didn’t have on my site.
I now have 2FA on everything I possibly can.
Simply yours, Kellie :-}
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