Yesterday I was catching a cab to the bus Station in Macedonia. It was a short 7 minute journey in which I truly feared for my life about a dozen time. Travelling through the city streets swerving in front of a bus to miss the next bus and breaking heavily to avoid the pedestrians crossing (at the crossing) tends to move the luggage in the back of the cab around a little. So as the cabbie opened the trunk to get our luggage out I see my laptop bag (with 2 macbook pro’s in it) drop to the ground. My heart sinks and my first thought was “F*&K there goes my laptop”.

If you were in the same situation today and your laptop was to die (like I thought mine may have) how would you fair? Do you have the right backup solutions in place to ensure that this type of setback isn’t going to ruin all the hard work you have done to get yourself a nomadic lifestyle? Being able to work from anywhere sounds like a dream for most people, and it certainly is, but it also raises a whole new set of challenges that you will need to overcome if you are going to be successful at it.

About 20 minutes after my laptop dropped to the ground I decided I should sit down and just check whether or not it was working. When I opened the lid and typed in my password, I thought I was okay…. A minute later it still hadn’t logged in. So I rebooted and got the flashing folder with a big question mark. Do a quick bit of googling on the second laptop and I find out that this means there is no Hard drive which means it is either cactus or come loose.

Luckily I was near a computer store and I borrowed a screwdriver to pull the back off my laptop. Fortunately on this occasion it was simply the fact that the impact had dislodged the new hard drive I had installed. So within 20 minutes everything was back to normal. During that 20 minutes though I was pretty calm, logically going through the contents of my machine and thinking what I had and hadn’t backed up. Which surprised me, I thought I would have been in a bit of a panic.

• Important client files – Check
• Website code – Check
• Billing & Accounting information – Check
• iTunes library – Check
• Travel Photos – Check

If the worst did actually happen the most I would have lost is a few movies and TV episodes that I had converted to digital format before I left Australia and hadn’t yet imported into my iTunes library.

So today I thought I would outline my current backup procedure and my future steps which should make all of my data safe into the future (fingers crossed).

Equipment.

Let me first outline the equipment that I travel with for work. There are more bits and pieces but those are either for the kids or for leisure and aren’t strictly necessary for a lifestyle where you can work from anywhere. I have a 2009 13″ Macbook Pro and after 2 years the laptop was still a great laptop but it was starting to slow down a touch so instead of going out and buying a new one I decided to beef this one up a little with the hope of getting another year or two out of it. So I doubled the RAM from 4GB to 8GB for about $80USD. I then read somewhere about removing the DVD Drive and replacing it with a second Harddrive to give me more space. So instead of just buying a normal hard drive I decided to go with an Intel Solid State Hard drive which would give me a couple of benefits.

• Because the read/write speeds to the SSD (Solid State Drive) are much quicker it would mean quicker boot times and better responsiveness of the programs. I can certainly vouch for this.
• Secondly because there are no moving parts in a SSD it means that it should be a little more robust in the event that it is ever dropped etc.

Now admittedly I do lose a DVD drive but I hardly ever used the DVD drive and if I really need one I can always buy a cheap external DVD drive.

These are the specific products that I bought:

Solid State Hard drive – Intel 320 Series 120 GB SATA 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive

RAM – Kingston Apple 8GB DDR3 SDRAM Memory Module

Hard drive enclosure – 2.5″ 9.5mm SATA 2ND HDD Hard Drive Enclosure for Apple Unibody

MY BACKUP REGIME

Important Files

I am not a huge fan of having to constantly initiate backups because ultimately even with the best of intension you inevitably forget to do it regularly enough. I do have a 1TB External hard drive that I plug in and use Apple’s Time Machine to backup occasionally. When I am stationary this works fine, but when I am on the move the back up HDD just doesn’t get plugged in often enough. So what I really wanted was a solution that would continually backup the important information on my laptop. This is where Dropbox comes into it. I have bought a yearly subscription to the 50GB plan on dropbox. All of my client website and work files go into this folder and are constantly backed up and synchronised whenever I am connected to the internet. This works perfectly for me.

Dropbox offers a free 2GB account and gives you an additional 500MB for every person you refer. Alternatively purchasing the 50GB plan for $99/year or 9.99/month or the 100GB plan for $199/year or 19.99/month is certainly a very worthy business expense in my mind.

Email

My easy solution here is to use an online email system like gmail. I have now been using GMAIL as my primary email account for the past 2 years and although I occasionally flirt with the idea of using a desktop client to access my email, having my email as a hosted service means I shouldn’t lose any information if my laptop dies. There is always the built in fear that what happens if Google looses all my data. Well quite frankly my feeling is that GMAIL does a much better job at backing up that I do. There are privacy issues etc, but that’s not for this blog post.

Notes / Projects / Business Ideas

I use Evernote quite extensively for personal and business matters. When I start a project I create a new evernote folder and share it with the company. They can then update the folder with TODO items or bug fixes that I need to complete. We can share information and files (although I usually share files via dropbox) but you can do it in evernote if you need to.

I have upgraded to the Premium subscription for $45/year but you may not need to do this for your business. I probably didn’t need to do it for my business…

Billing / Invoicing

I have been using Freshbooks to invoice my clients for almost 2 years now. I have two accounts. One for my Australian company and one for another business. I honestly think it is the easiest and most efficient invoicing system on the market. It is completely online so all of your information is available on any computer so if you laptop dies you can still work out who owes you money.

FUTURE BACKUP PLANS

At the moment I still have a pretty big gap in my backup solution for my travel photos which are nudging on 250GB in size. At the moment we transfer them to yet another external hard drive. The problem with doing this is that we have absolutely no backup solution if that external hard drive was to fail.

About a month ago I 1TB hard drive which had almost 800GB of movie and TV episodes on it corrupted and I lost all the data. Simple as that. One second it works and the next it’s unrecoverable. Seeing how fickle this was I have decided that backing up our travel photos to an external drive is simply not good enough. So when I get back to Penang from our trip in Eastern Europe I plan to buy and set up a Network Storage (NAS) device.

NAS – Network Attached Storage

Okay, what is a NAS device. You can buy these in all sorts of configurations, but I am planning on buying one that has a minimum of 4 hard drive bays in it. That means I can buy 4 hard drives and configure the system to distribute the data over the 4 drives in what is called a RAID5 configuration. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. In effect it means if one drive fails I can replace it and rebuild the information from the other three remaining drives.

Because NAS devices can be connected to the internet, with a little bit of set up work and the use of a dynamic IP service like dyndns.com or something similar I should be able to connect the device to the internet and be able to access and backup all of my information wherever I am in the world. The only draw back of this method is that it is bulky and it is impractical to carry around with you. We have a home base in Penang, Malaysia that we can set this up at and just leave it running while we are travelling. So if you are looking to go down this path that perhaps try to set one up at your parents place or a good friends place. You could bribe them by offering them some of the storage space or by offering to pay for some of their monthly internet connection subscription as it will definitely use up some of their bandwidth.

Other backup solutions

Being the Apple fanboy that I am I did consider the buying a Time Capsule, as another digital nomad that I know does this and given it is not too bulky he can just bring it along. It also has a inbuilt router that can be used to share his internet connection where ever he is. There are two drawbacks to the Time Capsule that I can see.

1. There is only 1 hard drive in the Time Capsule so you are just as susceptible to a hard disk failure as you are in your laptop.
2. Airport Security have no idea what it is so it can (and did) cause a couple of tense moments for this particular nomad.

Life has changed significantly in the past 10 years. In 2001 we travelled through a few European countries including a trip to Spain and back then we travel with a couple of laptops but they were bulky and we certainly didn’t have a backup plan back then.

Hello, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Colin Burns and I have recently taken over running the NuNomad.com website from Carmen and Ricardo.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for all the amazing work that they have done on this website and on building a resource and community to help people achieve location independence. They have truly created a great resource and I hope that my endeavours and enthusiasm for being apart of this community will help us to build a truly great resource for everyone whether you are looking to work from anywhere in the world or if you are already on the road and looking for a community to to help support your endeavours.

My background

I don’t know a lot of you guys so I thought I would spend a little bit of time in this blog post telling you a little about myself, what makes me want to get involved with nunomad.com and what makes me qualified to write anything about digital nomadism and location independence.

This very second I am sitting in a (cheap) hotel on the outskirts of London, tomorrow I will be somewhere in the south of England and next Tuesday we’ll be starting our adventure through Eastern Europe. (Yep, in the middle of winter may not have been one of our  smartest ideas, but we are suckers for a cheap airfare). So here we are in London, showing the kids the sights and spending a lot of time as a family.

In the past 2 years we have backpacked through Bali, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and spent 5 months driving around East & Southern Australia. All of this has been done while earning enough money to feed, clothe, educate and fly around 4 people (albeit two of those are rather small). So given that fact that I have been able to combine work and a travel lifestyle I think I am able to help when it comes to talking about being able to work from anywhere.

The family aspect of digital nomadism may not be of much interest to you and I promise that this website will not become a location for me to write about how cool my family is and how excited I was when my son, Noah lost his first tooth or the pride I feel when my daughter Hayley looks up at me with those big blue eyes. We have a website for that here and we even have a website for long-term travelling families here so I promise you I won’t be turning this website into a website devoted to long-term family nomadism.

By profession I am a Web Developer. I have been for the past 10 years. In Australia I owned a small web design firm which I sold/gave away in 2008. After working for a mid-sized firm for 16 months I decided to leave and go my own way again. Not long after this I finally convinced my wife that digital nomadism was the way forward for us and since that time we haven’t looked back.

Now some of you might think, well duh, anyone who has web development skills can be a digital nomad. Not true! And I can say this emphatically. Having a skill set that allows you to be mobile is only one of the many challenges you will face when you choose to become a digital nomad. For example, how does one get new work, what rates should you charge, how do you position yourself in the market? Do you want to work through online job boards like elance.com, odesk.com etc or do you build your own network to source work. Both methods have their pros and cons. These are some of the things that we can all help each other with.

Like any freelance work, digital nomadism requires you to think like a business person. Anyone can do it and I hope that through this website we can help equip you with the skills and information that you need to become truly mobile (if you are not already).

The future???

I have some pretty big plans for nunomad.com but before I start doing the things I want, I thought I would take the time to ask you all to help me come up with some ideas for the site. As I said I have the skill set that will allow me to transform the nunomad.com website into exactly what this community needs and wants.

So I would like to ask you to share your thoughts on what direction you would like to see this website go in. What type of articles, what type of resources, what type of functionalities would you like to be a part of nunomad.com.

One of the things I would like to encourage is the building of our community through our Facebook Group. I hope to foster an environment of sharing and support for others who are new to digital nomadism or are even on the road already and just want a community to be a part of to share in their successes or to help during the harder times.

What’s next?

I would like to start the discussion in our Facebook group (but I am still happy to hear any comments through the comments here). I will start the conversation by asking a few questions and hopefully everyone’s feedback will help us get to a point where we can all move forward together. I would really appreciate your honest feedback about the different parts of the website, how you use or don’t use particular parts of the website and generally any thoughts on how you think we can improve.

My sincere aim in this transition is complete transparency. I want you at all times to know where you stand and what the future direction of the site will be. I can’t promise that every suggestion will be carried out, but I can assure you that every suggestion/criticism will be heard and taken on board. Most of the communication surrounding the transition will be done in the Facebook Group so please head on over and join in.

I’m really looking forward to meeting a whole new group of people and hopefully together we can create a resource that will help the ever growing community of digital nomads.

All the best,
Colin

Today I enthusiastically introduce you to Greg Rollett.  I came to know Greg when I joined his RockStar Business Series (link on right sidebar) in order to increase traffic to this blog.  We had great results that you can read about in “How Our  Site Has Improved Through the Under 30 Rockstar Business Series” .  Since then I have been extremely impressed by and grateful to Greg for his enthusiastic support of our projects and willingness to help.

Recently, Greg has joined a new project, On Call Nurse.  Imagine knowing that wherever you are in the world you could always pick up a phone and speak to a nurse about any health question in your own language.  As a seasoned traveler I have often wished I could have accessed a service like this.  I hope you’ll appreciate this article as much as I do and will check out his new service.

Guest post by Greg Rollett

It’s not something you, me or really anyone actively thinks about. You know, what if I get sick while traveling abroad? What if my kids or spouse or whomever gets sick when we are in an unfamiliar country and possibly where English is not the dominant language?

That’s a big headache right?

And while you are planning your travel it’s the last thing you want to think about. I mean come on, plan for beaches, trails, mountains, boats, restaurants, castles, sporting events or plopping down for a few months to work on yourself and your business. That’s what we want to plan for.

And while this might not top your exciting things to do while planning list, there are a few quick things that you can do to ensure you are ready for Montezuma’s Revenge or whatever else comes your way.

Let your home country know that you are leaving.

Now, no one likes to give the Government too much information, but in this case, they are collecting information about your trip in order to let you know of any family emergencies and also give you ways to contact them in the case of an emergency on your end. This may not be the most popular option, but it is a good way to be able to get in touch with loved ones back home by using a government intermediary. The US version of this can be found at https://travelregistration.state.gov.

Talk to your health insurance company.

This may or may not make you happy after you talk to them, as many providers do not extend coverage outside the US. For those lucky few that have extended coverage, hats off to you my friend. For those that do not, the next best thing is to see if there is a US Consulate located close to where you are traveling. They can provide assistance in locating health care providers and facilities, contact family members in the U.S., and assist with the wire transfer of funds from the U.S.

Check for health watches and health scares.

Before you head into foreign soil, do some quick Google News searches to see if there are any health scares in that region. Look for outbreaks and other things that strike you as odd and out of the ordinary. Doing a few quick searches and investigating can save you some trips to a local hospital or doctor. You can also check with the hotel, hostel or host family you may be staying with when you arrive. They generally have some good info for tourists, and your health is in their best interest as you can spend more money at their hotel and restaurants if you are healthy!

Talk with your doc about prescriptions.

This is an overlooked travel item for many people that we encounter at On Call Nurse. Travelers who head out into a trip and forget to stock up on prescriptions. The best thing to do here is to get a letter from your doctor describing the medical condition and any prescription medications, including the generic names of prescribed drugs. This will help in getting you the meds you need, when you need them.

Have an emergency number to call.

For those left without insurance when traveling abroad, or for those that may have overseas insurance, having a number to call that will get your questions answered in your home language is extremely important. A service like On Call Nurse is there for you 24 hours a day in over 150 languages. All you need to do is dial the number from any phone and get the answers you need about pressing health issues. This can be anything from injuring yourself on an excursion to eating bad local food to allergic reactions. Having someone to talk to to get real answers can be extremely helpful in getting you back on your feet and exploring the world that you set out to see.

What about you? Have you run into issues while traveling? How did you handle them? Do you have any tips to keeping yourself healthy as can be? Share them in the comments below.

This post was written by Greg Rollett. Greg is the CMO at Cognitiv, an Internet Marketing Company whose latest product, On Call Nurse, provides direct 24/7 access to Registered Nurses. Learn more about health issues while traveling, or contact Greg directly at greg@cognitiv.com.

This morning I received and e-mail from one of our NuNomad buddies, Milosh Zorica.  Milosh has been a part of our blog since we interviewed him in November of 2008 (click here for Milosh Zorica – Graphic Designer on the Move) and I again used some of Milosh’s thoughts on crossing borders in Bordering on Madness.

Milosh is a hard-core nomad who occasionally emails me from many different parts of the world.  He works as a graphic designer.  If you’d like to see his stuff, check it out at Coroflot.

Today Milosh sent this fun list on how to know you’re a Third Culture Kid and I thought many of you nomads might resonate with it!  Thanks Milosh!

You know you’re a TCK (Third Culture Kid) when:

1) You struggle to answer the question “where are you from?”
2) You speak two (or more) languages but can’t spell in them.
3) You are asked, “Where are you from?” has more than one reasonable answer
4) You feel odd being in the ethnic majority
5) You look like everyone else around you but still don’t fit in
6) You have the urge to move to a new place every couple of years
7) You go into culture shock upon returning to your “home” country
You have a passport, but no driver’s license
9) You don’t know where home is (besides saying, “planet earth”, which is usually not accepted)
10) Your life story uses the phrase “Then we moved to…” three (or four, or five…) times.
11) You think VISA is a document that’s stamped in your passport, not a plastic card you carry in your wallet.
12) You sort your friends by continent not color or religion.
13) You believe vehemently that football is played with a round, spotted ball.
14) You feel that multiple passports would be appropriate.
15) Half of your phone calls are unintelligible to those around you.
16) You know the geography of the rest of the world, but you don’t know the geography of your “own” country.
17) You’ve gotten out of school because of monsoons, bomb threats, and/or popular demonstrations.
18) You often speak of your “home” country in the third person as if it were not yours.
19) You constantly get labeled being from another country than “yours”. (Usually one you lived in at one point.)
20) You have friends from more than 30 different countries.
21) You realize it really is a small world, after all.

Feel free to add.

You can connect with Milosh at any of the following places:

Linked In

http://www.linkedin.com/in/miloshzorica

Coroflot

Milosh is a Co-Founder of Loana Technology, a media streaming and digital assets protection startup

Photo by: Loungerie