(Editor's note: This post continues a short series about using Office Live Workspace to help you work from home.)
When you work from home, for your own business or someone else's, you wear many hats. One of them, for most people, is that of a chief information officer. Or IT department head. Or computer tech specialist.
Or let's be more realistic. You don't have a fancy IT title or your own staff. You are simply your own geek, unless you have spouse that does your technical support for you, or a neighbor with lots of free time.
Christopher Elliott, a writer and producer who has run his own home business for almost two decades, understands this well, and that is why he offers tips and advice in his Office Live Small Business article, "Top 6 technology challenges for home businesses."
Check out his challenge No. 4 in this article: Inadequate data backup.
It is most definitely a challenge — losing your data in an accident or a disaster could wipe out your entire business. Yes, many people who work at home don’t back up their data or do any catastrophe planning regarding their data. They are risking everything by not investing some time and attention to this important task.
Office Live Workspace provides up to 5 gigabytes of storage space for free. What that means is that most home businesses can back up all of their files and documents — at least the vast majority of them, if not all of them — to a password-protected online workspace, accessible via a Web browser. Trust me, 5 gigabytes is a lot of storage space; it equals more than 5,000 books of text, which means many thousands of documents.
With Office Live Workspace, you can avoid using Flash drives for backing up files; Flash drives can easily get lost or misplaced. Not true with Office Live Workspace.
For more information on using Office Live Workspace to back up your files online, see this previous blog post. See also a video from a user who has peace of mind now that she knows her files are stored away safely but are accessible whenever she needs them.
Monte Enbysk