For the love of God, people, back up your computers!
My hard drive crashed the other day. Luckily, I do have at least most of the files backed up to an external drive. So I can restore without too much pain and discomfort. I’ll lose some stuff (like that copy of Faster Pussycat’s greatest hits and those photos I took as part of my application to star on High School Musical), but not the whole shebang. Just for giggles, I’m going to spend this weekend testing out the geek legend that you can get data off a failed hard drive, in some instances, by freezing it.
But the whole thing definitely impressed upon me the need to have a good back up strategy in place. And most importantly of all, you must actually use that strategy for it to work.
And here’s something else for you long-toiling writers out there… Think about also keeping a backup of your material off-site somewhere. There were lots of New Orleans writers affected by Hurricane Katrina who lost everything. They had backups, but stored inside the home. So if you’ve spent the last decade working on your novel or that exhaustively researched biography of Jim Varney, then maybe you want to keep copies of those files in a safe deposit box. Or buried in the plains of Montana or something.
I’ve even heard of some nervous writers who go so far as to wear a thumb drive on a string around their neck in order to protect their manuscript files. So let’s hear it. What’s your craziest back up story or superstition?
This isn’t particularly crazy or superstitious, but I made a dummy Gmail account, and I email whatever I’m working on to it at the end of each day.
I’ve heard of people doing this. Although I don’t believe they sent drafts to themselves each day. But this is definitely an easy and inexpensive way to have extra copies of your work.
Another friend also printed out her dissertation every couple of days. This way, she always had a hard copy in case her computer crashed. Granted, that wouldn’t help in the case of a home catastrophe like fire or flood…
Another cheap way of backing things up is to Gmail (or any ‘Net email) yourself your documents. When my harddrive crashed, I would have lost everything had I not sent every slightly changed version of my writing to my Gmail and workmail accounts. I was able to recover everything of importance by re-forwarding it to myself.
Plus, a harddrive crash is sometimes a good thing, as it shows you what really matters versus what you were just hanging on to for no good reason!
…with me it seems to be a ritual: when I am within one week of getting a final draft of a book ms back to the publisher, my computer crashes. This has happened twice. Each time, I had no backup. Each time, I had to pay someone to retrieve the entire thing from the hard drive. To quote Ann Lamott: a total eff-ing nightmare.
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yeah, I’m one of those thumbdrive-around-the-neck paranoids, I guess. but I also push versions onto all kinds of servers, and try to do the email thing about once a week or so, when writing a novel. and of course I print and stash copies all the while. other than that, I pretty much just worry that I’m still going to lose something. kind of overvaluing my words, I suppose, but oh well. they don’t go away anyway.