Most of us store important information in places that we do not control. We imagine that we will never lose it. How could a company like Google go under, or why would they close our email account?

But it’s not a sure bet, and backing up our data is like an insurance policy. Just as we pay a bit of money in the unlikely event we will get a lot of money later in the event of an emergency, we can consider it an insurance investment to spend time backing up electronic information that we will want later.

Here is a post from Seth Godin explaining how to backup your Gmail account. I am no model in this area, but this is a good reminder that I should be considering this in business and in life.