Episode 058 – You lost all of your Art Images and Photographs! What do you do?

Episode 058 – You lost all of your Art and Photographs!  What do you do?

All I can say is that you BETTER back your SH** up!

Greetings Rockstars,
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve spoke to business people who have made the mistake that they always regret. Not backing up your work, I am not only talking about artists and photographs of the world but I’m talking about your bookkeeping, your database is your back ups your finances your documentation, spreadsheets and the list could go on.

If you don’t have a lot of documents to back up, you could very well get away with getting a thumb drive with for whatever size yuo need, 4MB, 8MB, 32 NB or whatever to keep your data current, but if in the event of any type of loss, whether it’s a theft a fire and that thumb drive goes missing (or better yet left inyour pants pocket, then waches… cmon… you know we have all done that one time ot another) then you are going to be in a world of hurt and regret. There are so many ways to back up your information now to keep it safe and the good thing is when you backed them up you also have access to them from other devices… for instance Carbonite, this is saved my butt on more than one occasion, and I’m also able to login and grab a file AND if I’m out of town and I need to access something then voilà there it is in my saved a cloud folder.

Two years ago my computer was acting strange and I took it to my local computer fix-it crew and they determined that my secondary drive where I keep my documents was failing, it had become corrupt the warranty had expired on that hard drive two months prior and NONE of the data was recoverable. Any ordinary day this is would’ve put me over the edge to probably have been on the brink of madness, but I know that my back ups were being conducted on a daily basis with my cloud service back up service which I use is Carbonite.
I also use dropbox so that I can share information with folks that I’m doing commissions with, working with other clients on branding projects, transferring files from one computer to another effortlessly and not having to have a thumb drive on hand all the time, and AGAIN… in fear of losing it no doubt. I love thumbddrives I think they are the best invention since the smoothie, however… they can easily get misplaced rather easily. Let me ask you a question, how many times have you gone to a clients and left your thumb drive in their computer or have mistakenly gone to Staples, OfficeMax or to get things printed and have accidentally left it there, or in the pocket of your jeans and it’s gone through the wash, I will tell you that crap happens yes it does and when it does it’s a big giant bummer.

I know that there are a ton of old-school artist and business people out there who don’t want to rely on having cloud services back your stuff up, then you should be able to also get back up services that will take care of you if in the event of an emergency.

I had a really great conversation with an incredible business associate of mine, she’s always on the ball she’s got her orders documents in order she’s always on top of everything and keeping yourself current on technology and we started talking about back ups and she said “oh yeah I back up all my files into another drive on my computer” and I asked her where if ever her computer was stolen or if there was a fire what would happen to that information and she said ” I suppose it would be lost as well”.

I encouraged her to connect with a back up service, the following Monday that’s exactly what she did. Let me tell you Rockstars the reality is $60 base minimum a year will save your butt do all the work for you and you don’t have to worry about it it takes 15 minutes to set up. Now of course, depending on how many files that you have to back up and you all know that photographs take a tom of room up so that back it could take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks. When I lost my did my hard drive two years ago it took almost a week and a half to get everything backed up onto my new hard drive. And let me recap when my technician told me that my drive had failed my response was oh not a problem because I use Carbonite, I back up my SH***** (aka stuff). He said that’s great because you know how many people we come across that spend thousands of dollars trying to recover a drive that has gone corrupt and that’s not even guaranteeing that we will receive or get anything off of there.

These are things that you should be doing not only as an artist everyone, but you need to do this as a business person and just as a person who cares about their data. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that on the computer they didn’t care about something on their computer. If you musician you’ve got recordings, you have music written, you have lyrics to protect, if you’re an artist photographer you’ve got photographs, if your business person you have perhaps your tax information you’ve got legal paperwork, in your own personal life you have important documents that need to be saved if in the event you encounter an emergency.

I’m noting some references in the show notes about links to these back up services and other options so be sure to check those out.
Dropbox has free cloud services up to a certain size limit and of course you do get benefits when you pay for yearly service. Carbonite. is $60 for one year, Rockstars, that is $5.00… that is less than $.17 per day!!!

If you would like to know more about how to grow your business specifically your art business connect with me on RockstarMentor.com. I’ve got some freebies on there, sign up for our newsletter and receive a free copy of my basic exhibitor tool kit. If you want to start getting out there and start showing your work whether it’s on an art walk in your city or if you want to start exhibiting on a regular basis through art and wine festival’s or even gallery shows this basic exhibitor tool kit is for you.

This is a wrap today everyone I am so glad that you tuned in I hope that you are having a fabulous week and enjoying this episode. If you are new to this podcast make sure that you check out all of her episodes I have close to 60 episodes at this point that will help you Rocket in this art industry. If you want to make money selling you are than this is the podcast for you, I will keep you accountable keep you energized and I want you to succeed with selling your artwork!

My name is Sonya Paz, I am a professional artist entrepreneur manufacturer and designer located in Northern California, I have done everything there is to do in this art business. I’ve had successes and I have had failures. Through failures I always find success and lessons to strengthen my journey as an artist and I am here to give you the scoop on how you can do that too.
This is a wrap for today everyone I hope you have a great week !

Keep creating and gift in the world with your art and creation!
Peace out y’all!

Here are some awesome resources for remote back up services:
Carbonite.com

Mozy.com

DrobBox.com

Box.com