Back It Up!
Should your e-mail operations take a temporary plunge, you'd better have a back-up plan.
I admit it: I was stupid. Worse, I was lazy. For months, e-mail had accumulated in the inboxes on my hard drive, and I never backed it up or even printed out crucial correspondence. This slothful strategy proved excruciatingly painful when, suddenly, the system went into spasms and wouldn't boot up. The only cure was to reformat the drive and reinstall all the software. That's no big deal--far less onerous than newbies fear it will be . . . if you've backed up your key files.
I hadn't, and I paid the price. I had to beg clients to remind me what we'd agreed to. In losing my e-mail, I'd lost my to-do's, contract terms and lists of appointments. I basically seemed the fool for a few weeks. Never again. Now I scrupulously back up my e-mail on a weekly basis.
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