Last week I almost lost 200 client contacts

I've been running my consulting side hustle for three years. Every client lived in one online spreadsheet. Last week I opened it — three months of records were just gone. Support told me "system upgrade, data migration had discrepancies." My palms went cold.

An Hacker News thread snapped me awake

There's a developer called Armin (alias). He used NeoVim to write code for two years. One day he opened it — three months of work records were all gone. The tool deleted them itself, no warning, no recycle bin. He wrote one line I'll never forget: "They have no basic duty of care toward their users' data."

I read that and immediately thought of myself. The CRMs, cloud drives, note tools we small operators use — aren't they all "storing our memories" for us? But do they actually care? Not necessarily.

I then set three rules for myself:
1. Important client data: export to CSV manually every week (10 min)
2. Core info stays in two places — one online tool, one local copy
3. Before switching tools, export all data first (independent designer Jin's playbook — he's switched tools five times, never lost a client record)

You can start this week

Money: $0, fully manual
Time: 10 minutes a week
Technical barrier: if you can copy and paste, you're good
First step: before you log off today, export your client contacts to Excel. Save one copy locally and one to your cloud drive.

Advice by stage

If you just started (no real clients yet): don't panic. Just build the habit now — every time you add a new client, copy their info into your own email draft.

If you have 1-2 long-term clients: spend 10 minutes every Friday doing an export. Name files with dates ("clients-2025-01-15.csv").

If you're scaling (5+ clients / thinking about hiring help): go automated. Use Make or Zapier to auto-backup your tool into Google Drive.

One last thing: this isn't for everyone. If you have few clients and you're on something solid like Notion or Airtable, exporting once a year is fine. But at least know this — your data isn't as safe as you think it is.