Comments on: Back up, Back up, Back up

By: sgj

sgj — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:18:50 +0000

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.

By: Dov Sugarman

Dov Sugarman — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:37:50 +0000

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By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:02:48 +0000

…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.

By: Justin R. Buchbinder

Justin R. Buchbinder — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:01:14 +0000

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!

By: Scott at Slushpile.net

Scott at Slushpile.net — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:26:13 +0000

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…

By: Timmy Mac

Timmy Mac — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:08:54 +0000

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.