I had a friend, let’s call him Leo, who was writing what he considered his masterpiece. Now Leo had been working on his novel for months. He’d get up early in the morning, fire up his laptop, and allow his creative, caffeine-induced juices to flow. He was almost done when one morning everything changed. It started out like any other morning. He woke up while the sun was still a couple of hours away, grabbed his favorite mug, filled it to the brim with his favorite blend of extra-bold, and hit the power button on his PC.
Nothing.
He hit the power again. The black screen seemed to grow a shade darker. He checked the power chord. Perhaps his daughter had accidentally…no. It was plugged in.
It was gone. Everything. His finances, his pictures, and… his masterpiece. His seminal work was lost. Gone. Forever.
In today’s world of inexpensive backup methods there is no reason why anyone should become another Leo. So please, please take my advice and do one of the following.
- Purchase a flash drive. They are inexpensive and even a 4 GB drive won’t set you back much.
- If you have a tremendous amount of data to backup, invest in an external hard drive. It’s not a wallet breaker and the peace of mind is worth it. I use this method to back up my Macbook using Time Machine.
- Backup to disc media. A CD that you can hold in your hand secure that your novel is safe will allow you to sleep better.
- Email your novel drafts to an online email account like Yahoo. Documents are not that large and the upload times are quick. You can always delete older drafts to preserve mailbox space.
- Sign up with an online backup service that will allow you to store Gigs of data on their servers. They are safe and very reliable (Carbonite Online Backup and Mozy Unlimited Backup are a couple that spring to mind).
If you do one thing today, allow yourself a few minutes to backup your work or invest in one of the methods above if you’ve never done so.
So what happened to my friend Leo? Well, Leo did recover from that tragedy and went on to write a couple more novels and a play. He is currently writing this very sentence.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Laurie 07.02.08 at 8:54 am
Well leo, uh I mean RIck, it’s funny that you write on this topic as I have been shopping on line for an external hard drive. I’m taking this as a sign that I need to move forward with more speed than I was. Thanks. What book did you almost lose?
Rick 07.03.08 at 11:43 am
Put your external drive at the top of your list. It’s saved my hide more times than I can count, even back in the days of tape backups.
It was actually an unpublished novel called “Angela”. I have a draft that I will someday go back to. It’s more on the horror/suspense side of things.
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