How To Perform Often Overlooked Backups

In a previous issue of Traces, I introduced the idea of backing up important but often overlooked things in your business. These are items like your email lists, saved information, and customer data. This issue, let’s talk about how to perform some of these backups.

Before going further, throw out the idea that you need expensive, complicated software. Instead, think of backing up as simply keeping a copy of the data in question.

With that in mind, lets’ start with…

Email Lists

Every reputable email newsletter or autoresponder service will allow you to export your lists. If you use Sender, log in to your account, and click the Contacts tab. From there, below your name on the right side of the screen, you should see an Export button. Clicking that will trigger a download of all names and email addresses in your account.

If you wish to export by list, filter your Contacts by lists first. Then, click the Export button. You’ll want to repeat that for each list.

Every email service provider is different. If you are using another service, ask their support team how to export your lists. This should be a standard feature of their service. If they don’t have that option, it might be time to look for an alternative.

Evernote

If you are an Evernote fan like me, you have a lot of data there.

Good news, backing data in Evernote is super easy. You only need to right click on the notebook, and click Export Notes. Repeat for each notebook. You can also use your regular computer backup software. However, you must configure it to pick up Evernote’s data folder.

Evernote support has complete details where this folder is on your computer.

Google Account

Use Google? Then you’d want to download your account data every so often too. Google makes this easy with their data download tool. You access that by going to:

https://takeout.google.com/ settings/takeout

From there you can select what data you want to export. Google will zip everything up and send you a download link.

An extra note on Google Accounts. Do at least one export as soon as you can. If you have ever lost access to your Google account, you will know it can be difficult to get it back. Particularly when you lose access to alternative access verification methods.

These are just three services examples. You might use a lot of different tools and have data across many places online. The good news is, most services have a data export feature. You only have to use it. So put it on your calendar as a recurring task.