You might wonder why anyone would pay to backup a free service, but many independent professionals including freelancers, contractors and consultants use individual Gmail accounts as their primary business platform. This includes email, business contacts and calendar, and potentially gigabytes of critical documents such as client deliverables, sales presentations and proposals.

Sure Google has world-class disaster recovery capabilities, but only for their disasters, not yours. The trash folder is your only backup and once that’s been cleared, your data is gone forever. Not a very good backup if your livelihood depends on the work you have stored in Google.

Of course there are free solutions but these can be manually intensive, limited in scope, and/or impose unrealistic storage limitations for a professional user.

For less than one billable hour of the average consultant’s hourly rate, you can backup Gmail, Chat, Docs, Calendar and Contacts for an entire year to unlimited Amazon S3 secure storage. This gives you peace of mind for the next 12 months knowing that you can quickly recover data that has been accidentally (or maliciously) deleted, altered or otherwise corrupted. You can even export your data free of charge for local use whenever needed.

And when you’re ready to move up to a Google Apps account, CloudAlly will grow with you providing automated daily backups of all users within your Google Apps domain, as well as the ability to backup Salesforce, AWS SimpleDB and other leading online services.

So before a personal disaster strikes and you have to tell your clients that you’ve lost their work, visit CloudAlly to sign-up for a free trial and start backing up your Google business data today.