I learned a very tough lesson over the weekend. It’s a lesson that you only ever need to learn once.

Over the past weekend my house was burgled. My laptop was stolen along with many other gadgets and pieces of coolness. The reason I single out my laptop is very simple: It had my entire business life on it, and now a massive chunk of it is gone.

Thanks to the loss of my data and the lack of backups, I have suffered a massive setback in my time. I have to redo presentations, try and remember meeting notes and nuances from clients, meetings, projects and campaigns that I no longer have. My entire sales pipeline is safely backed up and running off of pipelinedeals.com, thank goodness. But ultimately the damage is done.

A harddrive of mine was also taken with years and years of music and photos that were collected over time but that’s all personal possessions that I’ll miss but get over.

The key point here that I am making is that there is massive value in doing the following simple things to make your life easier in case of theft or loss:

Use Google docs

Motribe makes use of Google Docs for our business development projects, project maintenance and project planning as well as product planning and other little valuable pieces of gold that we think of. Thankfully none of this stuff has been lost with the theft of my hardware. It’s all there and waiting for me.

Get your employees on to Dropbox

Dropbox is an amazing place to share offline documentation and presentations as well as strategy documents. General maintenance and admin can also be taken care of on Dropbox, things like storing digital invoices, staff contracts and the like can all be saved in the cloud and never worried about again.

Back everything up

No need for any long-winded explanation for this, just back your life up, everything.

The most valuable thing to me on my laptop that was lost and will never be returned is a startup diary I had been writing for 10 months about my experiences with Motribe as a first time startup entrepreneur. That is gone and I’ll never get it back.