It used to be that if someone didn’t get the letter you mailed them, they waited until the next day. Those days are a distant memory. We’ve developed high expectations of the communication tools we use. Even a minute of downtime can cause businesspeople to start to panic or call their IT manager. Here are 5 tips to avoid frustration when tech tools or services inevitably fail.

Here are 5 situations that can cause your productivity “parachute” to fail. Do you have a reserve chute? We’ve also included what you SHOULD do instead:

• “Gmail is down, what do I do?”

What you should do in advance: Make sure all your mail is stored in a duplicate, separate  location. Could be in Outlook or Mail on your personal computer, or on a Yahoo Mail or other mail service. You can set up rules to automatically move messages so that they exist in multiple places.

• “My hard drive containing all the photos of my kids just died. What do I do?”

What you should do in advance: Get a balanced system, one that is designed to tolerate drive failure. The pros use “RAID” but you don’t have to learn any fancy technology. Instead, the Drobo is a great tool for this – why would you fly an airplane with only one engine on it when you can fly one that has four engines?  Drive fails, you just pull it out and pop in a new drive. That’s it. It moves all your files across the drives so that it can handle any one drive failing without missing a beat.

Drobo, self-managing storage

• “All my data is with an online service which I fear may go out of business”

What you should do in advance: Check the service’s policy on what happens to your data if they cease to operate. Look for service-level agreement. Or ask your consultant to do due diligence on the system for you. Many services also offer export capability so you can periodically get a snapshot of all of your information just in case.

• What if my laptop gets stolen and I lose all my information?

What you should do in advance: Put undercover security software that you can instruct (through the company’s manufacturer) to activate in the event of a theft. Depending on the software, the system will record things like where it appears to be located, and if you have a camera on the laptop it will even take a picture of the “new owner” and send it silently over the internet. This helps law enforcement considerably. Plus, some software allows you to put a “remote wipe” on the system to help remove sensitive info once you realize it has been compromised.

And because you use web-based backup IN ADDITION to your office, wired backup, you’ll have a very recent copy of all of your information. For web-based options, try Mozy, Carbonite, or another online service.

• My client left their company and I don’t know how to reach them any more.

What you should do in advance: Use Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com) and connect with them now. Then when they update their contact info later, you’ll still be “connected” and will be able to send them a message through the LinkedIn service. This enables them to not have to give you a secondary email (some people prefer privacy).

Here are some great tips on how to use LinkedIn for many different business purposes beyond just “connecting”. Power User tip: you can even create an RSS feed so that you get updated automatically when someone changes jobs so you can re-connect with them.

If you’re in business involving any appreciable networking and aren’t using LinkedIn extensively, send us an email and we can offer up some more suggestions about how to use this powerful service.