The Hurricane-like winds in Southern California is a concept unheard of in my 55 years here.

Never have I seen such damage.

And these winds impassionately turned the fires into blowtorches in some areas devastating homes and lives.

At last count this morning, over 1/2 million people were told to evacuate in San Diego and Los Angeles counties. In Ventura County we have been lucky and blessed as we are only "downwind" of the smoke. The heavy smoke from the fires from Santa Clarita took a bee-line to Thousand Oaks and created an eerie science-fiction-like scene of Nuclear Winter. Breathing was difficult for awhile but that was the worst of it. Thank you God.

Many of us depend on our data for our business and so I thought I would give you some ways to protect yourself should you need to consider evacuation.

1) Always keep a "fire folder". If you don't have a fire safe, open your top drawer of the file cabinet. On the left, closest to front create a folder called "Fire". This is where all your valuable documents go and the only thing you should need to grab if there is a fire. Write in big letters on the front: GRAB EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. You may be in panic mode and need clear instructions for yourself

2) In this day and age, photos are too easy to electronically reproduce so they really should not be thought of as something you need to grab. Pay your kids to scan them and save them electronically in a folder or on CD (which you keep in the fire folder)

3) Backup your Outlook. (For those of you who already own Outlook for the Entrepreneur CD Set, this is explained in detail on CD 4) Your outlook data (email, contacts, calendars, notes, and journals reside on a file called outlook.pst. You can readily find it and back it up as follows to any external drive or CD:

- From the Outlook menu, choose File, Data File Management

- Highlight Personal Folders (or whichever file has Mail Delivery Location) and click the Open Folder button

- Outlook loads Windows Explorer and highlights the Outlook data file

- Hold down the Alt key and press the Tab key taking you back to Outlook

- Close Outlook (first the Outlook Data Files dialog box, then Outlook proper)

- .With Outlook closed, you can now copy the Outlook.pst file in the Windows Explorer freely to Hard Drive or CD.

NOTE: Your outlook.pst file must be smaller than 780 Mb to copy it to CD.

4) There are inexpensive backup solutions if you don't have an external hard drive or your outlook.pst is larger than 780 Mb

- Purchase an external hard drive soon if you can

-.Copy your outlook.pst to a pen drive (not the most reliable but it's still better than NOT backing up)

-.Archive your Outlook data and compress the outlook.pst file making is smaller so it CAN be copied on a CD

-.Call Jason Thayer of www.datapreserve.com (818) 222-9898 for inexpensive remote backup

5) Swap your CD with a trusted friend or family member periodically to keep your valuable data offsite and not in your home.

I hope and pray the information here helps those of you in the more dangerous places, but all of us may face some danger like this someday, so please consider these strategies.

Good luck!

Paul Wagner

The Software Magician

P.S. Get a FREE Outlook Report, 5 FREE Outlook Videos and more atwww.OutlookMagic.com