Irony is a funny thing. Last week at a band rehearsal, I was reading through a new book by Michelle Goodman called “My So-called Freelance Life” (review forthcoming), and I had just finished her section on disaster recovery. In other words, what is the game plan when something goes wrong? As a freelancer, if your biggest repeat client bails or you have major equipment malfunction, how do you carry on your business and still bring in a profit? This really got me thinking and I started formulating ideas in my head.
Having already been through a huge catastrophe earlier this year when my web host lost this entire site AND the backups for it, I know what it’s like to spend a nightmarish two weeks putting your life’s work back together piece by piece. I am still finding things that need to be cleaned up every now and then. That aside, I started thinking about what I would do if my printer died or my iPhone failed and so on. Little did I know I was going to have to think a lot harder and a lot faster very soon.
An hour after reading that section, I arrived home and sat down at my desk to finish a quick graphics job for a client. I booted my Mac and it went through all the normal clicking and whirring sounds as it powered on. The only problem was….no screen. Nada. No picture whatsoever. The cute little apple logo on the back was suddenly dark and very rotten-looking. I tried all the alternate ways to boot the Mac, safe boot, from DVD, etc. Nothing worked. Tried an external monitor – no dice. I was hosed. My MacbookPro was toast.
So here I was ready to sit down and crank out my backup plan when – BOOM- it happens. It was at this moment I pictured Alanis Morissette swooning on top of my monitor, singing “it’s like 10,000 PC’s when all you need is a Mac…it’s a little too ironic, don’t ya think?”
The next day I drove well over an hour to the nearest Apple Service Center where they came to the same conclusion as me – the logic board was fried. Off to Apple it went. That was last Friday. It is now Thursday and I have been without my laptop for nearly a week. If I had only a few more hours of uptime on that Mac last week, my disaster recovery plan would have been typed-up, neatly printed and filed away for safekeeping. Instead, I was reduced to paper and pen and a 10-year-old windows desktop machine with 256mb of Ram and a 13gig hard drive. No Photoshop. No Illustrator. No web development tools. And none of my important files. Yikes!
What about backups you say?
Oh I have lots of those. I have a Terrabyte Time Capsule that has everything backed up on it. I’m not the least bit worried about data loss should my MacBook be returned to me with a completely wiped out hard drive. The problem is that I’m now using a Windows machine. Windows cannot read the Mac files on the time capsule. I can’t retrieve my files unless I have another Mac with OSX. What to do?
Buy a new Mac!
I wish. Although that will become part of my goals for 2009 as I would like to replace one of our windows machines with a shiny new iMac so I do have a future backup machine, it’s not in my current budget. For the moment, I can’t do much because some of my files are just plain inaccessible. Rather than sit here and bide my time stewing over the inconvenience of sending my main workstation off for repair, I grabbed a pad of paper and pencil and mapped out a list of things I could accomplish with the tools I do have. I started with a list of “tools” – basically I have 2 older windows computers, an iPhone, a cable Internet connection, pencil and paper. Next I considered my software options. Here is where it gets tricky because I am now on Windows instead of a Mac. No problem. Most of my working tools are web-based, meaning I can access them from any computer with an Internet connection (see my list at the end of this post). So in a nutshell, I can’t do any graphic design work while my Mac is being repaired, but almost everything else was salvageable even if I had to download a few freeware windows apps (like an ftp client) to get by temporarily. Happy Happy Joy Joy!
But what about the client projects I have to finish? Fortunately, they were understanding when I emailed and explained the delay. Since their image files were already in progress, I figured it was best to put them on hold until my Mac returns. However, in the future, I have a backup plan for this (keep reading).
Hijack a Mac
By Monday I was having serious creativity withdrawls, so my design partner offered to let me use her iMac in her apartment while she was at work. Perfect! I get to spend a few hours with Photoshop and Illustrator. Not the ideal solution since round tripping it across town to her place, plus setup and shut down times takes a good hour out of my workday. Still better than nothing and I can tackle a few short graphic projects and at least feel productive. Better to lose the hour and still be able to get some paid work done than to sit in my home office on a freelancer’s holiday and not make a dime.
So I had to create my backup plan on the fly. Not fun, but at least I know my backup plan will be solid and cover all the bases. I know exactly what tools and files I need to have on hand to keep functioning and what I can do to be better prepared next time. Trial by fire is always interesting. Sometimes I think it is the best way although it never seems that way at the time. ;)
Here is my freelancers toolbox for working from anywhere:
- Pencil and Paper – for quick notes, don’t leave home without it (unless you have a digital equivalent which is equally as fast and convenient)
- Evernote – this software is cross-platform and web based – perfect! I use it to dump all sorts of snippets, web pages and general data for later retrieval by searching for tags or text.
- Remember The Milk – web-based task management with gmail and iPhone integration, fabulous for quick lists
- Delicious – my bookmarks are critical to my work. Delicious is phenomenal at organizing them.
- Gmail – I am soooo thankful for webmail. I used to hate web-based mail but now I can’t live without it
- Google Docs – saving my butt right now!
- Google Calendar – it’s my schedule and I have to have it available to me at all times. It syncs to my iPhone and my Mac so it’s everywhere whether I am online or not.
Future backup implementation:
- Gmail – I plan on creating two new gmail accounts where I can send weekly zip files to myself. This would ensure I can retrieve a client file from anywhere, even on a borrowed Mac. ;)
- Google Sites – These are fairly new, but powerful. I am in the process of creating a private space for my design partner and I to share files and notes for our projects.
- Google Docs – I now know what files are critical to my working routines. I plan to copy these over to Google docs, again so I can retrieve them from anywhere.
Yes, I am a big fan of Google but there are lots of other great web apps out there. If you have any that you can’t live without, post a comment below!
Oh – and as I type this, the battery light on my windows machine keeps flickering between A/C power and the battery. Apparently the power cable has a short in it. My daughter has been whining about this computer not working right when she plugged it in. Guess I should have paid more attention to her complaints. Yesterday I ordered a new power cable and I’m hoping the current one will last a few more days. If not, I will be spending more time on borrowed machines. It may slow me down, but I’m not going to stop working. :D
