Badass Is The New Black (Season 4) Episode #22- Tips For Backing Up Your Content

business advice business coach content content creation Aug 17, 2022

Most people talk about protecting your business from other people stealing your work. Have good terms and conditions, and it’s true, but what about protecting your content from loss or being deleted?

The recent loss of my IG account has me thinking more and more about backing up my content and HOW to back it up.

Tune in to today’s episode to learn more about WHAT to back up in your business and some of my favorite platforms to use to back up content.

Tips For Backing Up Your Content

I remember a night back in high school when I was writing an extensive paper. I think we all remember those days, way back when, and we had this big assignment and I of course, was pushing it off to the last minute because I'm a procrastinator. I was waiting till the very end.

I always get a lot of inspiration and creativity in those final moments before something is due. And I was working on it all evening all night and at 3:00 AM the paper just vanished before my eyes, it was gone. It was on word which was not cloud-based. It was just gone. It disappeared. And I was so frustrated and angry. I remember just sitting there crying at the computer.

I worked so hard on this paper and I can't do it again. I can't remember everything that I said that was really good. And it's due you know, tomorrow or the next day, and I'm not going to have anything to turn in. And I was just completely devastated. My mom didn't know what to do. My dad couldn't figure out who we could call? Like what tech person could we call? And I just remember the devastation there of losing something that I worked so hard on. And it's happened to me multiple times throughout my life, you know, in high school, it was a paper that I was working on, on the computer in my business.

Why We Back Things Up

I remember editing a video, like a training that we had done. And I actually had to do some specific editing, like moving pieces around and clipping out things that we were talking about in questioning and then we're like, oh, that's not how you do it. I wanted to clip that out because it wasn't relevant and move it, you know, this would be better talking about before. It really cleaned up the video and I spent at least two hours on it and went to backup, went to upgrade my computer, so that it would work faster, my husband always bugs me about how slow your computer is. Cause you don't upgrade it and dah, dah, dah. I hit the button to upgrade now. And literally it was like 20 megabytes short of being able to upgrade the computer system because it had so much stuff on my computer. There just wasn't enough room. And so my computer just completely froze and I couldn't do anything. I had to completely wipe out my entire computer and delete everything on my computer.

And thankfully, you know, fast forward from 2001 or two to 2021 at the time, now it's 2022 where we've got all this cloud-based stuff. The only thing that I didn't have backed up or couldn't access that I really wanted and needed and was working on was this video. And I moved because it wasn't cloud-based. And so it wasn't the end of the world.

It was two hour I spent on it. Of course I was upset and I was frustrated. And to be honest, I don't think I ever just went back and edited the video. I just said screw it because I just didn't want to put the effort and energy in. But this happens quite often where we lose things where things aren't backed up.

And so I want that to be the topic of this conversation. And by the end of this episode, I want you to think about what are some things in my business that I haven't backed up or that if something happens to my computer or my program gets deleted, like I won't have to feel these feelings of devastation and hopelessness and these feelings that like, oh my gosh, I can't even, I don't even want to start over. I don't even want to do it. There was a girl in the Kajabi Facebook group a few months back that posted that she was asking if anyone knew how to get a product back. She needed to know how to get a course back in Kajabi because she had deleted it. And she had worked for two years developing the videos and the trainings and everything that she had put into this program on a product on Kajabi. And she deleted it and I was kind of like, how do you delete that? You know, it wasn't like a Kajabi error. It was a user error. She deleted it. And then she further explained that she made a duplicate.

She cloned the product for whatever reason I do that all the time to maybe keep the same format or it's for a slightly different person. Whatever reason you clone the product? Well, when she went to delete it, cause she didn't need it anymore. She deleted the original one. She didn't have anything significantly like differentiating the two or so that she could tell this was the original and this was the duplicate.

I don't know if she missed the word copy on there. I don't know if she missed that or the one or whatever. It's pretty subtle. She deleted the wrong one. She deleted the one that she had been working on for two years. I mean, talk about devastation and these feelings of like, I don't even know if I have it in me to do it again.

Like sometimes I talked to Michael about that. I'm like, you know, what if like everything that we've done over the last 10 years, if I had to start over from the very beginning, I dunno, I might do something else. It's been so much hard work. And I think probably because I know now what I know and I know all of the hard work and all of that.

If I just lost everything and had to start over, it would take me a bit to get going because I would just be thinking about all this hard work that I put in and having to start from scratch. The great thing about starting out in entrepreneurship in the beginning is you don't really know the future and like how hard it is going to be now, you know? Cause I just told you, so you go after it, right? And you put in the energy for it. But I digress back to deleting things we put in so much hard work and what we're doing, what you're teaching people, what you're putting out there, it comes from love and passion.

I just know it because again, entrepreneurship is hard, you know, and you wouldn't be doing it if you didn't love it or if it didn't make you feel good. We put a lot of love and energy and time and effort into building these things. And so if something happens to it and it's completely wiped out and disappears, that's a hard pill to swallow.

Cloud Based Platforms

I want to help you do some things and think about some things in different ways so that you can not experience this type of loss. Number one, find a cloud-based platform that allows you to store files, pictures, videos, various things so that you can back up your content there. So Google drive is one example or Dropbox is another example.

Those are the two most popular. I am sure there are others out there, but those are the two that I'm most familiar with. I really like Google drive. It's just more intuitive to me. It's easier for me to work with. My husband likes Dropbox. He uses Dropbox for everything.

But to me, it's totally worth it to be able to have enough space to just back things up on this cloud-based platform so that I can have it if something happens.

Organize Your Files

And one big tip that I have when you're putting things into a cloud-based platform is really try and organize them. Don't just drop 50 videos into your platform and just be done with it, organize it from the beginning because here's the deal. If let's say your program gets deleted, it's going to be equally as daunting to then be like, okay, now I have this folder of 50 videos and worksheets and content, and now I have to spend the time and figure out where it goes. Whereas if you have it organized in your, let's just say, Google drive as if it almost were the program in your, you know, Kajabi or attract well or wherever it is, it makes it so easy to just, Hey, let's just re upload it in there. Or you can have someone else do that.

We've done that intentionally with another program, from one Kajabi to another, where we had to say, okay, take these videos and now create a new product in this other Kajabi and upload them all because we had it organized, whereas like digital duplication academy folder.

And then when you open up that folder, it's phase one, there's a phase two folder and there's a phase three folder. And then you open up phase one folder and there's a folder and it says videos. And then you open up the next folder. It says, worksheets, you open up the next thing you know? It's very organized in a manner that someone could go in and literally just take that content and plug it back in.

If you were to accidentally delete your course or your program or your class, you would have the content to be able to go back in and in not that much time rebuild it. Okay. Super important, super effective. Videos, coursework, such as worksheets content that you've created that maybe just lives in a Kajabi or your attract well like posts, that's the text, you know, copy that into a Google drive document in the appropriate place and make sure it's really organized. Have any programs that you've done backed up. Have any videos that you've done backed up. All of my podcasting recordings, they're also found in my podcasting folder. If anything were to happen to a podcasting platform and things just got wiped out, I actually have podcasts. I have seasons 1, 2, 3, and four now folders with the, with folders inside folders with the videos. The videos, the pictures, if there's a guest in there, the final video after editing is in there, we've got a folder for our intro and outro. We try and keep everything really organized in case something happens.

Clearly I've dealt with losing things before, or I don't think I would be as adamant because I am not a very organized person. I'm very like on the fly, go with the flow. Organization and thinking about these things only comes from experience of losing them. I'm just trying to pass this knowledge onto you. If it hasn't happened to you, you can set yourself up for success before, before it gets to this point. There's two other things I want to touch on in this episode today. One is email lists. Cause that's something that we don't really think about. Of course we think about the videos, the worksheets, the content we're creating for a program. But what about your email list?

Back Up Your Email Lists

You've spent maybe years building that maybe you've spent two months building your email list, whatever it is it's taken hard work. You have maybe been on other people's podcasts. Maybe you've spoken at a virtual summit. Maybe you have put out a freebie out there. You've done YouTube videos and social posts trying to draw people in to build this email list. And what if it did vanish?

We talk about social media, which I'll get into in a minute. We talk about the fact that you don't own your social media. If your social media were to shut down or, or you got off social media or whatever may happen, at least you own your email list and you could reach out to your people. But what if your email list disappears?

What if there's some crazy tech hack that happened? The platform that you use for your email system and it wipes out email lists, nothing is full-proof. Even if you put it in a Google drive, something could happen, but we can take steps and actions to try and prevent or be prepared if something were to happen. Okay. Email us backing up your email list.

Actually remember way back in the day when floppy disk existed, I'm definitely dating myself a bit here for the computer where you had left floppy. Does he have to like put it in the computer to run a program or to back things up? And I remember my mother worked at an orthodontic office and at the end of every night, they would back up their system.

They would put in these floppy disks and they would download all of the information to these floppy disks in case something happened to the computer so that they would have all of their patients information on floppy disks. Now that backup typically probably happens in a cloud-based platform somewhere, but you know, people have always been backing up some way or form. Now it's just a bit easier with this cloud-based stuff, but your email list is another thing to back up, especially if you've been at it for a while and you have a decent size email list. Even if you have a hundred people back it up. Go into your email platform, go to your contacts. I know in Kajabi, you just like click on this. What is it? I have it right in front of me.

You click on on this little thing. This is displaying, you know, contacts that you click on, that it selects all of the contacts and then, and then you can export. You're gonna want to export your email list. It's going to download as a CSV file with Kajabi. It will send it to your email and then it will give you three days to download it from that link or it will disappear.

Make sure that you're taking that extra step and actually downloading it to your computer and then, or into your Google drive or Dropbox, whatever cloud-based platform that you're using so that you can access it doing cloud-based stuff. Also, besides backing things up allows some flexibility because you could access it from any other computer. If you didn't bring your computer with you and you needed to jump on someone else's to access something, maybe someone on your team needs something you could get into your cloud-based platform and you could grab it and send it to them. Okay? Super helpful. The last thing I want to talk about is social media.

Back Up Your Social Media Posts

What about your social media? What of your social media disappears? You think that it might not happen, but it just happened to me. I currently have not had my social media for over my Instagram account specifically for over a week, shut down. You can not find me if you search the Krissy Chin, it does not exist. It is not there. And I'm hoping that I can get it back, but for now it's just gone. It's vanished. I can't access anything. I can't get in there. I can't see my old posts. You literally can not find me. And it's up for debate as if it's like someone.

I think what happened is someone, people like to use my pictures to create fake accounts. And it's always like Amber underscore crypto. Like, if you ever get some weird someone trying to be your friend, that's using my pictures, but it is not, my name don't accept it, but they're always crypto stuff. What Facebook has said is that because Facebook owns Instagram, that they likely blocked me or not blocked me, reported me as impersonating someone else so that I would get shut down. Someone reported me as impersonating someone else. My account was shut down. And now I literally, while I have spoken with someone at Facebook and they've said, yeah, you could get, you'll get your account back in 24 to 48 hours, five days later, nothing has happened. Just because, you know, they say, I'm going to get it back. Doesn't mean I'm going to get it back. I have no idea if I'm going to get my social media back. I don't want this to happen to you. And sometimes we can't prevent it. That was totally out of my control that someone else reported that I was impersonating someone and it shut my account down.

Like that's how easy it is. Right? Let's forget about the whole, like maybe you posted something that they don't agree with and they shut you down, but like someone could do that to you. My thoughts and recommendations on this topic are to also back up your social posts. And there's kind of like two reasons why this could be super helpful.

One, you can repurpose your social posts. If you're storing them in a database where you have access to them, you could hundred percent repurpose that post months later, maybe even less time than that. We've talked about that in my repurposing podcast episode. You can take old posts in your bank of posts and reshare them. That's great. If your social gets shut down, you will have all of your social posts. If I do have to start a new Instagram account, maybe with like a different name or something, I'm literally starting from scratch with zero posts, zero posts. And so if I have these old posts backed up, I could at least get some posts in there that are relevant to what I do, what I talk about, what people will be interested in so that I can at least get some up. And it doesn't look like such a fresh, fresh account. Right? I could put up a hundred posts or I could put up 10 posts, right, right away. If I don't have any of them, it's going to feel daunting. I'm going to feel like that time when I lost that paper or that the video that I was editing.

And it was like, Ugh, really? I got to start over from scratch. Like this just feels daunting and I don't even want to do it. Right. I'll just, you know, start doing things moving forward and forget about that. But if you have them backed up, you can use them. What platforms do I recommend backing up social posts? We've talked about using Google Drive or Dropbox or something like that for your other content, but for social posts, there are two platforms that could be helpful. They do have the ability for you to have a free account and you can store social posts in there. And there's some really cool things that you can do with the hashtags. You can even categorize them and put topics on them.

If you have different topics that you talk about, you can just have a better way to even search for that content. But at least you have them, you have the picture or the video, and then the post content and, and all of that, they're kind of stored on, you know, a cloud-based platform where you can log in to air table from anywhere and access that and use it.

And they do have, like I said, a free free option there. We started using later.com, L a T E r.com to post on social media. I actually logged into my later account and now it says, you know, I have two Instagram accounts attached to it. I have GROworkspace attached to it. And then the Krissy Chin, and it says the Krissy Chin has been D you know, unlinked to it because there, it doesn't exist anymore. But so I was like, oh, I wonder if my content is still there that we have posted before. When we scheduled it to post, I went back to my calendar and some of those posts were still there, videos, images were there. And then the actual caption is there. I could take that content and then re upload it to post on social media.

It doesn't feel, yeah, there's some work to be done because you have to kind of find the stuff you want to post and repost it, but it's not as daunting as, oh my gosh, I have to completely recreate this stuff. Now I haven't done that from the very beginning. We only started using later, not that long ago, so I don't have that much that I could post, unfortunately. But if I have to start over just, it is what it is and I'll get through it and I'll move on and everything will work out and it will be fine. But there are certainly some reels that I've created that I thought were really good. And I can't remember if I saved them to my phone or not.

Now they actually have those features where when you post a reel, it will save it. You can set up the setting so that it automatically saves it to your phone. That could be another option. And then if your phone is backing up to the cloud, then you know, you'll have those there as well. So that's, you know, kind of anytime there's the opportunity to back something up, you know, make a copy into that. Just note, if you're, if you're making a copy of something or you're downloading something to your computer, you're going to use up a lot of space, fast. To have, and pay for an external cloud-based platform like Google drive or Dropbox, and put it in the Google drive and then delete it from your computer.

I was also making that mistake where I was taking a file, a video that was on my computer, like on my desktop. And I was dragging it into Google drive. And then all of a sudden, my computer is so slow. It's not working. I have no space. And I'm like, what the heck? Like, what is all this, what's taking up all this space.

My husband's like, you have like 300 videos on your computer. And I'm like, why? And then I realized that when I was dragging them into my Google drive, it wasn't, it wasn't taking that video off of my computer and moving it. It was just basically making a copy. I needed to delete it. Another thing to be conscious about is when things are synced up in a specific way, if you delete it in one area, it might delete it from another. So, and this is why I'm not using Dropbox anymore because I just couldn't get it. I was too confused about where my Dropbox was linked up to my computer. When I would delete something from my computer, it deleted from my Dropbox because it was like synced up. Okay.

It was just, my brain didn't work that way, how Dropbox functions. That's why I use Google drive and my husband uses Dropbox. That is, you know, something else to think about, you know, and outside of just your account, getting shut down. One other tip that I have, cause I remember it was actually October of 2021.

I remember it very well. The day that basically Facebook and Instagram went down because of some tech thing with the anyway, basically when someone tried to type in Facebook or Instagram into a web platform, the, you couldn't find it. It wasn't there. It was not in existence. No one could access Facebook, Instagram and what's app because Facebook owns all of those.

Diversity Social Platforms

That's another thing to think about when you're putting energy and effort into a platform. I don't, I don't teach that you have to be on every single platform, you know, Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Tik Tok and Pinterest and LinkedIn and Snapchat. And like the list goes on and on, right? I don't say that you have to be on every single platform. However, it is nice to diversify a little bit and maybe be functioning on two platforms that are owned by the same person. If you were only on Facebook and Instagram and something like that happened again, where you literally like something in the, I don't know, deep webs of the tech happened, it took down all three of their platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and what's app. Then you'd really be in the dark. Okay. So having a YouTube account, maybe where some of your videos go or I'm using LinkedIn also because that's where your people are. Again, it's all based on where your people are, but you know, just think about being on two different platforms that aren't owned by the same company, just in case something happens. And then of course, backing things up in another place. If YouTube shut down or wiped out all your videos or closed your account, but a new video platform opened up, you could take all of those videos you created for YouTube so long ago and you could upload them to a new platform. Okay. This is the reason for backing up.

If you've never backed anything up before, it's time to start doing it, start thinking about it, backing up your email list, your videos, any worksheets that you've created, any content that you've created, anything that you've created pictures, you know, for a course or a program, if you've created a lot of pictures, like put those in all those pictures in a folder folder.

And then the next step further is to keep them organized in your cloud-based backup system. That if something does happen, it is so effortless to just, and you could literally to the point, pass this off to someone else. That's how organized it is. Pass it off to someone else and say, Hey, re upload all of this content into my Kajabi or my attract well or whatever it is that you're using.

Okay. That is my goal for you with backing things up and being able to leverage the content if something horrific happens. That's it for today. I would say, come find me on Instagram and say hi, but it may not be there right now by the time this episode comes out, hopefully I'll get it back on Facebook. I’m @theKrissyChin as well.

We'll see if I meet you back on Instagram with the same name or a different name. I don't know. Only time will tell, but thanks for hanging out with me here, whether you're listening on a podcast on apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen, or you're watching on YouTube, it was fun hanging out and I'd love to connect more in the comments on YouTube.

Let me know what was maybe helpful for you or share a time when maybe you felt this way, you lost something and it was heartbreaking, but how you overcame that challenge. We're all about overcoming challenges here, taking action, imperfect action, so that we can make the most out of things and make the magic happen.