I moved recently, and in the process I cleared out my home office. One of the many things I found and binned was a bunch of evelopes from around 2006. What was in the envelopes? All of the source code, along with instructions of what to do with it, for eavery one of my clients at the time, all neatly addressed and sat in draw.
Why did I do this? Well, back in 2006, not long after I went freelance, I was diagnosed with very advanced Hodgkins Lymphoma (a Cancer of the immune system). I was pretty ill, and I wasn't 100% sure what would happen, so I made a bunch of backups just in case!
I'm fine now (touch wood) but I still think about work in terms of what would happen if anything were to happen to me. These days all of my client work is on distributed source control, which makes getting the code out to clients very easy if anything bad were to happen. I also try and store any useful/important information about the code that can't be gleaned from the comments in readme files as well to help things along.
It might seem a bit morbid, but as a developer, I've come across many, many instances where a developer has buggered off mid project, not leaving much behind and then had to go in and try and salvage the project. So I'm always keen to make sure that if anything does happen to me, my client's aren't screwed.
Do you have any contingency plans in place in case anything happens to you? I'd be interested to know what others do for this sort of thing!