4/20/09

Backing Up: A Cautionary Tale

I should have known better. I have many, many writer friends who've lost precious files due to inadequate back-up. I thought I was better than that. I thought I was taking precautions. I backed up all my writing files (I thought) to copied files and stored them in a different place on my hard drive. I also put them on a jump drive. I thought that was good enough. It was not.

My hard drive crashed. Many files were unrecoverable. Although most of them were on my jump drive, I'd gotten busy and lazy and hadn't put my newest WIP (nearly 40,000 words) on the jump drive. I also had an "idea" file, where I put basic plot lines for future books, that hadn't been updated to my jump drive in about a month.

I learned the hard way that a good back-up system is worth its weight in gold. Fortunately, most of them don't cost that much.

A good back-up system needs to be:
  • daily
  • automatic, invisible and easy
  • off-site

There are several systems out there that fit this profile. (I ended up choosing Carbonite but this is not a commercial for them).

I just thought I'd share this with you and hope you'll pass it along to your readers so they'll avoid my truly sorrowful fate.


Amen.

2 comments:

Th. said...

.

The story of my first two novels.....

Janice Sperry said...

A computer tech should be able to recover most of the info from your hard drive. Even if it's crashed. You have to go through all the files (this includes program files) in your computer because they won't be named and will be formated weird but it'll be worth it if you can save some of your work. Good luck!