Several weeks ago I wrote about how I moved all of my files to Google Drive, relying on Backupify to provide a safe backup in case anything went wrong.  I unplugged my external hard drive and put it in the drawer. (Sorry, hard drive!)  I felt a little naked without my Time Machine backups, but I was tired of having to undock my external hard drive several times a day when I took my laptop to a meeting.  So I embraced the cloud and relied on Backupify.

I’m happy to report it worked (but you probably suspected that was the case).

A few days ago I was making changes to an Excel file that projects all of our sales based on inputs like web traffic, trials started and so on.  This planning model is how I do long-term forecasting, plan hiring, and make other major decisions.  It’s a pretty complicated model (I’m an engineer by training) and I’m constantly making tweaks.  I made some major changes and saved the document.  Later that day I realized the changes I made didn’t work, so I needed to roll back to the previous version, which is where I ran into a problem — I had forgotten to change the filename of the document so it had saved over the previous version.  If this had been a Google Doc I’d be all set — Google tracks versions and allows you to roll back.  But Google doesn’t do pivot tables or complex formulas (yet) so I was using Excel, which means that my previous version was overwritten.

You’ll be happy to hear I didn’t panic — I logged into Backupify, found the file, exported it to my local machine, opened it up in Excel, and there it was — my previous version of the model, exactly what I needed.  So we’re back in business (literally).

This is precisely the kind of safety net that backup is supposed to provide. If you have a story about a “Save” I’d love to hear it, whether it involves Backupify or not.