“A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

I admit it. I’ve been a fool on an occasion or two. Quite number of years ago I stored all my projects on an external firewire drive. The fact that it was connected via firewire should give you an idea of how many years ago this was. I had been told numerous times to keep backups of my current and past projects. I didn't. I had been told that ALL drives eventually fail. Also good advice that I didn't heed. When that firewire drive died, I lost many months of hard work. I didn't have $500 to pay the data recovery company, so I was SOL. Heartbroken. Lesson learned the hard way.

Last week I had a drive go down. The drive I keep all current and some past projects on. Ugg. Not again! A few days later USPS dropped off my new drive from Amazon. I plugged it in and restored my data from my backup mirror of the drive. Painless.

Back up your files. Trust me on this one. You don’t want to have to miss a deadline or lose a client because your data got fried mid project. Yes, this happened to a friend of mine.

Here are a few freelancer must haves.

• RAID drive of some kind. I use a RAID 1 enclosure with two drives

• Battery backup/surge protector. These usually range from 150.00 and up. Not only will it give you a chance to save your current work should your power go out, it protects your expensive workstation from electrical spikes.

• A backup of your backups. Ok, I guess I’m paranoid, but I also keep a copy of my work drive backed up. I recommend a free program called FreeFileSync.

• A cloud service. While this is not practical for huge amounts of data, I find it useful to keep simple project files and final renders here. If you have it set to upload in the background, it’s pretty painless.

• Use Antivirus software

• Finally, make sure your main computer drive has a backup. I use a program called Acronis True Image. I create a clone of my main computer's hard drive. If my main drive goes down, I can just swap the drive and be up and running in a short amount of time.

Considering data recovery services are usually $500 and up and a decent computer is $1500 and up, shelling out a few hundred dollars for a battery backup or spare hard drive is relatively cheap. In fact, it’s a steal.