Talking with an Inventor this week prompted me to write this thread. When you invent something you may have had to use outside help to get it into its current state. You had someone build a presentation, a mold, website, prototype, CADs, 3D model, sell sheet, video, animation, etc.
The question is do you have the ability to access it any time you want? Where exactly is it kept and can you get to it if the individual/company goes out of business, your contact quits their job or dies, moves to a new location without telling you?
Consider if you had a design group make your prototype and they send you the prototype and you are happy with it and send it out for review. Months down the road you need another prototype made and you contact that same company and it is no longer in business or they had server issues and your CADS were lost. Do you have a full set of copies of their work in your possession or were you relying on it still being on their server?
You had sell sheets made and they sent you the PDF and you have been emailing and printing them off as you needed. Now due to additional features you need to update the sell sheet. Do you have a copy of the original sell sheet in a format that can be edited?
Your website was designed and maintained by a company and now that company is going out of business do you have access to get it moved to a new service provider, do you have the passwords needed?
If you have your product being made overseas and you paid the factory for the molds can you get the molds sent to the U.S. if you found a company here to do the work cheaper?
Do you have important documents saved in more than one place? Thumb drives, hard drives, external drives, computers can all fail. If they do and you have everything on just one of these items do you lose everything?
If you save everything to the cloud are you the only one with access, knows the password? What happens in the event of your death, you can’t remember the passwords or gain access to the cloud?
These are just some examples to get you thinking about making sure you are covered and your important items are accessible and safe.