You Do Not Back Up Your Work Enough

I live my working life – both day-job and writing wise – off a USB stick. It’s a necessity, ’cause I’m routinely shuffling between three or four different computers depending on where I am, and I like the option of being able to pick up and work on a particular project with an absolute minimum of planning ahead.

So you can imagine what a pain-in-the-arse it was when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop last night and did this:

Broken USB image

 

USB sticks are not meant to sit at that angle, you know? This one was completely dead.

Fortunately for me, this wasn’t a huge deal. Silas is still working fine and I lost about an hour of work, which sucks, but isn’t as bad as it could have been.

But it’s a useful reminder: back-up your work.

I used to do a semi-regular post on my blog reminding everyone of this, usually timed to coincide with  the anniversary of the day when I lost every damn thing on my computer back in 2006.

That was a bad day for me. Really bad.

And mostly it was bad ’cause I was already one of those people who was convinced I backed up everything. I downloaded all my active projects onto a back-up drive once a week or so. I kept copies on my computer and the USB drive I used when I migrated between university and the office at home. I was one of those people who was all redundancies, motherfucker, I have them.

It didn’t help. My computer went kaboom – a smoke-coming-from-the-back kind of kaboom – and ’cause my back-ups were plugged in, they went with it. And ’cause I’d just moved house, I’d culled pretty much all the paper print-outs prior to packing, which meant I had…well, very little.

I wailed. I gnashed teeth. I called the university and explained the problem, ’cause at the time I was about a year shy of submitting my PhD and I’d just lost fucking everything: drafts; research notes; stories I’d been working on for the creative project. Everything.

A couple of months after that I closed the doors on creating new work for the Clockwork Golem Workshop, the micro-publisher I’d been working on for about two and a half years, ’cause I’d lost all of that as well.

If you’re a writer, a publisher – hell, anyone who makes their living off your computer – the simple rule is you do not back up enough. Even after the kind of catastrophic data-loss I had back in 2006, where I amped up my already-pretty-obsessive back-up procedures, I got lulled into a sense of complacency. I’m comprehensive enough that losing a USB isn’t going to do me too much harm, but last night reminded me that some of my off-site back-up procedures should probably be revisited.

PeterMBall

PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.
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