Two recent events highlighted how important this is. Two weeks ago I received phone calls from clients complaining they could not send or receive email. They all used Cablevision’s Optimum Online service. They thought it was them. Turned out it was Cablevision, who had an equipment failure that took down most, if not all, of their email services for an extended period. Cablevision was slow to announce this problem. My customers who used Optimum’s web-based email client had no access to their contact books. Even if they had another email account, such as @hotmail or @yahoo, they had no way of finding the email addresses they needed.

The second event was more devastating but limited in scope. A distraught woman called me on a Saturday evening and left a voice message that a technician who had worked on her equipment had erased her 955 contacts from Outlook, her iPhone and MobileMe. The technician had neglected to back up the Outlook PST file and export the contact data before trying to initiate synchronization among the three information stores. The result was that he overwrote the good contact information with empty fields, thereby destroying all of the information. We are still working on resurrecting the contact list from a year old Palm device data dump. This has been a painful experience for both of us. I am glad it happened to some other technician and not me.

If you use email and address book (AKA contacts) applications on your computer you can back up this data as part of your normal back up routine. These are applications like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Address Book, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail. You will need to know where the applications store their data files and include them in your back up. Typically these applications must be closed before the data files can be backed up. Otherwise, the application locks the file making it unavailable for copying.

I suggest you also consider finding out how to export your contact list information into a plain text or CSV file. This way the exported information is easily read and imported into other applications, both local to your computer and online.

Many of us use Gmail’s web-based email client for our email. We rely upon Google to be there for us. But what if they suffer an extended outage like Cablevision? Or what if they lock you out of your account? Do you have a back-up of your contacts? How about your email? Email often contains important information we need.

Backing up Gmail contacts is simple.

1. Go to Gmail and click on the Contacts link in the left side panel.
2. Click on the Export link on the upper right of the Contacts page.
3. Select the Everyone (All Contacts) radio button.
4. Select an export format from the three choices.
5. Click the Export button.

Gmail will name the file and ask you where you want to save it. You might modify the file name to be more descriptive than the default.

I use a free Windows utility to back up my Gmail email to my computers. It is called Gmail Backup available for download at http://www.gmail-backup.com/download.

So when was the last time you backed up contacts and email?

How did this happen?
I pay GoDaddy to host both sites. They have great service, good prices and reliable hosting. They also have one of the most confused and confusing websites in existence. I went to their website, logged in and clicked on hosting under the My Products section of the home page.

This is what I saw:
I clicked on the second Manage Account link, the one for WHIT.tv. I was then taken to the Hosting Control Center v2.10.0 Home page, where I clicked on the Your Applications button. I navigated to My Applications – WordPress (installed), and clicked on the link to uninstall the application, thinking I was on WHIT.tv and only WHIT.tv, since the initial link I clicked on was to manage the WHIT.tv account. I was mistaken. I was on both sites and I had clicked on the wrong link, unknowingly uninstalling WordPress from RHFtech.com and not WHIT.tv.

I called GoDaddy and told them I had just deleted several years worth of work and that I needed them to restore the site. They said they could do that for $150. I gave them my credit card number and authorized them to restore my site, figuring I would save several hours worth of headaches in trying to restore my site myself from my backups.

GoDaddy tried and failed. After a week’s worth of attempts I asked for a refund, which is under review at GoDaddy. [Update: GoDaddy refunded my money.]

This morning I searched for how to restore from a backup. Yes, I have many backups as I am pretty good about that. First, I had to install the phpMyAdmin plugin into the WordPress installation. That took a minute. I then followed the instructions at WordPress.org Restoring Your Database from Backup. It took me a couple of minutes to follow those instructions.

And now this blog is back to the way it was before the New Year’s eve massacre. I am thankful that I backup regularly. I am thankful that my Google search found Restoring Your Database from Backup. I wonder, why couldn’t GoDaddy do this?