OnlineFreelance.com

First you need to imagine the worst possible situation that can happen to a freelancer: I’d say it is a HDD crash, a power failure and Internet failure that occur simultaneously an hour before the deadline, just as you finish the last part of the work :) The first advice is (like the uncle Adams said) – don’t panic! For such situations you need to learn to think fast and even to think ahead. We will provide you with some practical advice on how to handle such situations.

HDD failure (also works for other technical problems)

The best solution is: purchase a netbook or keep your old laptop, so in case your primary computer fails you will be able to take the information out and finish the work.

As for some of my personal experience, I had dozens of situation when windows started crashing somewhere at the booting phase (note from Alex: buy a mac :) and all these situations were solved with a simple filesystem repair. So if you have problems with booting simply plug in your hard drive into an external drive USB adapter (also a very useful thing) and run a simple fsck operation on the second workstation. If everything is okay, then you will be working again in 20 minutes.

Another good solution is to keep all the work on an external drive (flash preferred). In more than a decade of using the PC I’ve seen a lot of dead hard drives and not one dead flash drive. So in the worst possible crash situation you can simply plug out the flash drive, plug it into your second workstation and finish the work.

Power failure

While such things as power failures often happen only in the developing countries (usually lot of freelancers are from these countries), there is no guarantee that your younger sister (brother, cat, dog, girlfriend or drunk roommate) wont accidentally mess with the power cable or crash into your workstation. And boom, you are sitting in from of a rebooting PC. While most of the data will definitely be saved (if you have autosave enabled) it is still not a very pleasant situation. It can happen that all you loose a small part of the code and your concentration, but it also can lead to things like damaged hard drives and even burned parts of the PC.

The whole problem has one great solution – laptop computer which is the best friend of every freelancer or, if you prefer desktops, – an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

Internet failure

This is bad only for some type of work (like SEO) and for situations when you need to send the completed work to the client. So it is important to have a second internet connection nearby (the best one is to get a cell phone that can be used as a modem), to notify the client about the delay or email the completed work. One of my friends also used another solution: he took a cab to the nearest cybercafé. Not the most effective one, but can definitely be used as the last possible solution.

Tags: beginner, emergency, hardware, tips

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 07:51 and is filed under tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.