If you’re a blogger, online entrepreneur, mompreneur, fempreneur, affiliate marketer, freelancer, or side hustler, there is ONE tool you can’t live without in your online business: CrashPlan PRO. I reveal it to you in this post. It’s a must-have for online marketers!

This post contains affiliate links. You can read my full disclosure here. Thanks for reading!

Imagine that your computer or laptop decided to take a swim in your bathtub right now.

As you’re probably aware, computers and laptops are not amphibious species.

So, would you care about this little swim?

Would it matter to you if the water destroyed everything and you were left with a completely unrecoverable hard drive?

Would you be on the floor sobbing (or cursing) because you pretty much lost everything—invoices, contracts, documents, spreadsheets, bookmarks, passwords, photos, notes, templates, settings—all of your invaluable files that will have to be recreated from scratch? (If the idea of having to recreate your entire business from scratch doesn’t send shivers down your spine, you might want to check your pulse to make sure you’re actually a living, breathing human being.)

Or would you just breezily go buy a new computer or laptop and be back up and running in a few days, barely missing a beat, because you had an easily accessible copy of all of your files?

If you would be on the floor sobbing or cursing, you need this post before it’s too late.

You are really only one hard drive failure, one power surge, one virus, one big glass of water away from complete annihilation of your business. Living on the edge when your livelihood is at stake isn’t worth it!

The day (in sixth grade) that changed my data-saving habits forever

It sounds a little dramatic, but when I was in sixth grade, something happened that forever altered how I felt about computers and data.

I was in the middle of putting together an awesome science report on my computer with my super cool new word processing program. It was going to be the best report ever. I could insert all sorts of cool graphics and use all sorts of fun fonts with my new program, and I was convinced my teacher would tell the rest of the class how great I was after she saw my report.

I was almost done when something happened.

That something was that the mouse pointer stopped moving. I frantically moved the mouse around, hoping it was just a temporary glitch. About a minute in, I moved the mouse so frantically that I lost my grip on it and it fell off the desk. As I watched it swing back and forth on its cord, I realized I had to face the reality of my situation:

My glorious science report was gone. It was gone because I never pressed the “save” button.

As I’m typing this, I can still feel the pit in my stomach that I felt at that moment. I had spent hours on that report… and it was gone, all because I didn’t take the necessary precautions to save my data.

I painstakingly recreated the report the next day (unfortunately, the teacher wasn’t quite as dazzled by my beautiful report as I expected… oh well!) and went on with my life. But after that day, I saved documents as soon as I created them and I saved often. CTRL-S to the rescue!

It isn’t enough to just save to your hard drive…

Although saving documents to my computer helped me avoid losing data to a frozen computer, it didn’t help me if my computer itself crashed and burned. About eight years ago, I lost all of my data again to a virus.

That’s when I started using a portable hard drive to externally save my documents. This worked fairly well, but it was a serious pain in the you-know-what. At first, I backed up my files once a week, but then I moved to doing it daily.

I always had to make sure I selected the new files on my computer and wrote over the old files on the portable hard drive. It was an annoying process with a high likelihood of error. One night when I was really tired, that “high likelihood of error” became a reality when I accidentally copied old files over new files (not all of them, thankfully).

Fairly accurate portrayal of my face at that moment:

That was when I decided there had to be a better way.

There was (yeah!). It’s called CrashPlan (I use the CrashPlan PRO service), and since I first subscribed to it, I haven’t looked back.

CrashPlan PRO = My business insurance

CrashPlan PRO is a safe and secure cloud back-up service that automatically and continuously backs your entire computer* so you don’t have to worry about losing any of your files.

*Or, if you for some reason don’t want to back up everything, you can just select certain folders.

I jokingly refer to it as my business insurance that’s what it feels like!

With CrashPlan PRO, I no longer stress out about losing files or copying over files. CrashPlan PRO checks my computer for file changes every 15 minutes (you can change this to anywhere between one minute and one day), and anything that has changed in that time period is automatically uploaded to a safe spot in the cloud. (The idea of data being stored “in the cloud” is still a kind of weird concept to me, but it works!)

Here’s a look at my simple, but highly effective, dashboard:

As you can see, CrashPlan PRO is keeping safe 25,999 of my files. (I kind of feel like I should have made a new file to bump that up to an even 26,000…) I sleep so well at night knowing my data is safe.

Here are a bunch of great features, straight from the CrashPlan site:

A few other features you should know about:

The storage is unlimited. I currently store a little over 205 gigabytes, but CrashPlan PRO doesn’t care if I have megabytes of data, gigabytes of data, or terabytes of data.

They take file security very, very, very seriously. There are several layers of data security:

• You can password protect and encrypt (using a security key) your CrashPlan PRO dashboard.
• Your uploads are securely encrypted with AES-256 file encryption.
• Your data is stored in military-grade, state-of-the-art data storage facilities throughout the US and all around the world.

They offer deleted file protection. If you choose to do so, CrashPlan PRO will even keep copies of your deleted files. That means if you accidentally delete a critical file, you’ll be able to retrieve it!

It doesn’t slow down your computer. CrashPlan PRO works in the background and I’ve never noticed a performance difference.

It’s super inexpensive. CrashPlan PRO is a mere $10 per month per computer. I only have my desktop hooked up to it, so it’s just a flat $10 a month for me, but you can add as many computers as you want.

Restoring your data with Crashplan PRO is very easy (trust me, I know)

I wish I didn’t say I have personal experience, but I do. My hard drive completely crashed about two years ago (clearly I have bad luck with computers), but I wasn’t worried at all because I knew I could easily restore my data.

See the “Restore” tab in the image above?

I just downloaded CrashPlan PRO on my new computer (well, it was just plain “CrashPlan” back then), logged in to my account, clicked the “Restore” tab, selected the files I wanted (all of them!), and clicked the “Restore” button.

I blissfully downloaded my old data and all was well. No tears, curse words, or stress… just data happiness. 🙂

Ready to try CrashPlan PRO for free?

I hope I’ve convinced you by now that you need to check out CrashPlan PRO. I really can’t say enough good things about the service, and I truly believe it’s a must-have for any online entrepreneur.

Readers of this blog can try CrashPlan PRO for F-R-E-E (woohoo!) for 30 days. That will be long enough to give it a spin and make sure you like it. (I’m pretty sure you’re going to love it.)

>>To sign up for your free CrashPlan PRO trial, click here.<<

Note: When you sign up for your free trial, you’ll notice that the sign-up page asks you for your Company Name. If you’re a solopreneur like me, you can just enter your name in that section. Code42 (the company that owns CrashPlan PRO) says PRO is a good fit for you if you’re “a small business, freelancer, or working on your side hustle.”

Thanks for reading!

I hope this post was helpful to you! CrashPlan PRO has given me a peace of mind about my business data, and I hope it can do the same for you. It’s one business tool I definitely can’t live without.