Take Care of Your Tools

I have a friend.

I’m sure you have friends too, it’s part of the human condition; but that’s not what this post is about. Instead it’s about what you need to think about when you work at home from the computer.

So let’s take my friend, who we’ll call Tom Smith because that’s not his name. Tom recently got a laptop with Windows Vista, and was having trouble connecting it to his mp3 player. So he decided to install XP alongside Vista so he could dual boot (run the computer with either operating system for those who don’t know the term) and connect his mp3 player to the computer.

Sounds reasonable enough; but unfortunately Tom didn’t know enough about dual-booting so he ran into a problem. After installing XP, he could no longer get into Vista, and he had only very limited capabilities under XP. All his work files were on the Vista side and he couldn’t get to them. He messaged me with the problem and I was able to figure out how to fix it, so he could get to his Vista install and access his files.

This is the kind of thing that happens to everyone. It’s happened to me, it’s probably happened to you, and sometimes it worked out alright and sometimes it didn’t.

I don’t do that kind of thing anymore. I can’t.

When you’re a freelancer you can’t take risks like that with your data; some of it’s not yours.

I have a great USB based backup solution that I use regularly, and I advise others to look into similar things, because your client’s data can never be too safe. But maintaining a good backup plan is only part of the solution.

What’s more important is managing your computer.

Every one of us has client data on our computers. That data’s not ours, it’s theirs. They bought and paid for it.

So, much as I want to go ahead and play with Linux on this computer I won’t do it. I’m not going to take the chance that it will mess up my existing data. This computer has become a tool, it’s not a toy and not something I can play with. If you’re serious about freelancing you’re going to have to take a similar attitude.

Don’t lose your client’s data or you’ll lose your clients.

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