I’ve already gone on record about trusting companies you’re not paying with crucial business process. I simply won’t do it. If you’re a free service, I won’t be relying on you for anything that is crucial to my business.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I need to evaluate my business processes a bit more. Namely I need to think about them as it comes to data ownership. What happens to all my project data if Trello were to shut down? What about my billing records if FreeAgent disappeared? How much data did I loose when Ronin was purchased by Goddady, a business I won’t work with?

All of those services contain precious business data and the export options aren’t amazing. Yes in Trello I can get a .json text file of a card, but I’d have to do that for each card on each board and build an importer bridge to any new software.

My Ronin data couldn’t be moved to FreeAgent.

One of the reasons I use WordPress is that it’s open source software and hugely popular. I assume that at some point there will be a newer better CMS that comes along.

The popularity of WordPress now makes it a pretty safe bet that the next awesome CMS will have a way to move from WordPress to it. At the very least I could build my own importer between the two.

That makes my blog posts, pages, all my content pretty safe.

I keep thinking that putting my billing and project data in to WordPress would also keep me safe from data loss as well. Sure I’d have to build it since I think all the WordPress invoicing and PM tools out now are terrible.

But my data would be safe.

How do you keep your vital business data safe?

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