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IDrive-E: Sounds like a good IDEA

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Ever lost a hard disk with your precious data on it? I have several times. The first time was the most serious, the second or third times, I lost recent stuff only. But still having a disk go down means your files, pictures, data, addresses, favorites, music, etc.. all go with it! Frustrating.
IDrive-E is offering a service with lots of online backup features and enough space to save most of your work files, or important stuff, for FREE! With a small monthly payment of $4.95 you can get unlimited space for your backups. A year’s payment would certainly be cheaper than purchasing a new hard-drive, but there is an important additional security aspect: your data would be protected in an off-site location. If your house or work pc was stolen or damaged, as happened to a friend of mine, no problems, you’d still have your back up data set online.

In addition, you can make the space appear as a virtual drive with Windows Explorer. In other words, it would appear just like an ordinary drive, making data access easy, quick and convenient. When it comes time to restore your file(s), you can access any of the backup set versions that are stored, so you can make sure you have the right version.

For investorbloggers, backing up your data on a regular basis is a hassle, but a necessary one for the most part. The whole process can be automated, saving you time to focus on your business.

This post has been backed by IDrive-E.

Warren Buffett: What’s your email address?

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I’ve been asked this interesting question: “If you could get hold of one email address, whose would it be and what would you send them a message about?”

If I could get hold of one email address, I’d like to get Warren Buffett’s. As an investor, you have to admire his tremendous investing and management style, not to mention his huge record of returns for Berkshire-Hathaway since he took over nearly 40 years ago.

WikiPedia writes of his approach as:

  1. Generals: undervalued securities that possess margin of safety and meet expected return-to-risk characteristics
  2. Arbitrages: company events that are not related to broader market changes, such as mergers and acquisitions, liquidation, etc.
  3. Controls: build sizeable holdings, ally with other shareholders or employ proxies to effect changes in companies

So if I could email him, I’d interview him about the above. I’d be interested to look at the way he does research into these three aspects. A large part of his style of investing is his ability to see value where the general investor does not, so I’d be inclined to ask him how he finds such value, how he manages his team of managers, and what his defnition of ‘margin of safety’ is.

Perhaps his most notable aspect of his success must be: The key to successful management has to be knowing what you can do, as well as what you can’t. For example, email marketing and the whole internet thing is an area of business that he himself has avoided. However, even if he didn’t have much clue about it, I’m sure that he’d employ others who did. As such, he really stays out of day to day management, preferring the original owners, management and staff at the companies he buys to stay in place.

Whose email address would you like? Why? I’m going to tag another blog, and see their answer… My chosen blog: JohnChow‘s.

In the meantime, what’s your reply? Reply in the comments or register for an account!

This post brought to you on behalf of MindComet.

Insurance needn’t be a nightmare, if you keep your cool!

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Insurance is something we rarely spend that much time thinking about. I know that I only thought about my car insurance once in the last 365 days, and that was when I got a much bigger quote for a 2 year old car than I had expected.
It was naturally a big surprise since I hadn’t had any motoring convictions ever, had a full license, nor had ever reported an accident. Like I said, my car had even depreciated in value, but the premium of the insured value had actually increased. Made no sense to me.
So naturally, we looked at other ways to cut the premiums back. We ended up with a much lower quote, because we determined exactly what we needed, item by item. Though we stayed with the same agent and company, the detailed approach we used helped us to cut our insurance premiums a great deal.
With the detailed quotes from ASDA Home Insurance and Car Insurance, you can really find out what your insurance quote will be, BEFORE you pay a penny.

This post has been insured by ASDA Home Insurance and Car Insurance.