In my last post on Address Booking I mentioned the versatility of an online contact manager like Plaxo. If you decide to go this route, there are a couple things to consider:

1. Are you comfortable with your data being stored by a third party? Be sure you are happy with the security set-up.
2. Will you regularly backup your data in case said third party ever goes under?

We use a number of web-based apps to manage personal and business contacts, finances, and photos. In all cases we chose to go with reputable and well established service providers (Plaxo, Zoho, QuickBooks, Kodak). In all cases we also do a monthly backup (export) of all our data, just to be sure we have our own copy on an external hard drive or DVD (or both, for the pix!).

The protection/backup notion also works nicely in reverse: if anything ever happened to the set of data at home/at the office, we’d have duplicates online. Over the top? Well, we have lived through the fall of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan and SARS in Hong Kong, so we’re a wee bit cautious about these things. It all kinda happens in an instant…!

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