Let us begin with the sincere hope that you do
not have an early demise.

On the other hand, what if you did have a fatal
car accident today? Would your business partner
or mate know how to access critical accounts,
including your on-line banking and brokerage
accounts? Or, would your family know what to
do with your email, facebook, or other web
access points?

The smart solution is to ensure that your key
accounts and passwords are located in the same
place your Will and Power of Attorney docu-
ments are stored. In fact, a complete listing of
all your accounts and policies will aid your fam-
ily in the event you are incapacitated or die.

For sensitive materials, including your financial
accounts, nominate someone you truly trust,
include them in your Will or Power of Attorney,
and make sure they know where to find the
information if needed. Also, check with the
institution to ensure the paperwork is in order to
allow them access without major legal gymnast-
ics (often, this means a “joint account with right
of survivorship”).

For most people, the best solution is to leave a
sealed envelope with a trusted person (family
attorney or your best friend?), to be opened only
in case of death. (You will need to update such a
letter every so often as you change passwords
and/or accounts.)

Even if you have saved your data files to a hard
drive, you still have to be cautious – any IT pro
will tell you the only question about hard drive
failure is when it will happen, not if!

BACKUP OPTIONS
That is the key reason why it is important to
backup the backup.

Possibly you have heard of the 3-2-1 Backup
Rule: have three copies of anything important,
in two different formats (hard drive, solid state
drive, CD, DVD, etc), with one of the copies at
another location, away from your site.

This is good advice, and exactly where you keep
the backup is important.

Why? Just think for a moment about the fires in
California, or the flooding caused by Hurricane
Sandy in the Northeast, or that in the Carolina’s
last year.

If critical backups were merely located in a
different office in the same building, or at a
neighboring site, there would be a great chance
that any such backups would be destroyed, too.
And not only the business data – family records
and pictures easily could be destroyed.