Lost in Space
I probably shouldn’t write this post, but…I’m frustrated. A few weeks ago my hard drive crashed on my Alienware. I need to find the documentation on it as I bought the extended warranty, but the service rep insists it’s expired…conveniently a few weeks previous.
Anyway, since I have lost work before, I had everything backed up on Dropbox which I had been assured is foolproof and the safest way to back up work. It isn’t.
I lost everything associated with V Dusk Falling, the game I have been writing for. That’s eight months of research and stories down the drain. Last night I decided to send one of the new chapters of DRAGON VALLEY to the crit group and get back on track with that writing also, since a writer should always have a book in the birthing process, or so I think.
Oh, look. None of the DRAGON VALLEY stuff is there either. Now, that’s only 15,000 words, but it’s also a complete rewrite of the beginning chapters. Frankly, that’s beyond frustrating.
So, now I’m pondering what the best method of backing up work is. I’ll probably reload Liquid Story Binder tomorrow and start saving work there as well as various other places. I know I need to back up to more than one place now, but it’s such a pain to back up edits to four places like I am now and it’s getting very disorganized.
Maybe I should print everything out at the end of the day.
I feel like I am just drowning in writing 101, when I should be writing. Now I don’t even want to write until I get a handle on getting my life in order and get some kind of a fool proof system in place.
Well, I do want to write, that’s what’s frustrating. I really wanted to get back to work on DRAGON VALLEY now that I am kind of getting caught back up with the Dusk Falling stuff. I want to go back to the page and read about my little fairy dragon and continue his journey, but now I have to go back to the beginning and re-write all that so I can.
I may have to bite the bullet and see if I can try to recover the crashed hard drive. Will offered to try and do that, but now I’m paranoid about even mailing it.
So, how do you protect your precious?
Julie,
I’ll send you all the copies I have of your work in my files.
I back up to a flash drive after every work session. Everything on my computer gets automatically backed up to an external hard drive every day. And I also email copies of my files to myself. And I print out stuff from time to time.
I’m so sorry to hear that you lost your important files! That’s always so frustrating. Maybe you should invest in an external hard drive as well. They are a lot more reliable than flash drives, and have far more memory capacity. You may also want to back up your files onto online data storage websites, some of which also specialize in data recovery.
I keep all my files on a big external hard drive. Then I have 2 portable external hard drives which I back up once a month. One stays at my house and the other at a friends in case of fire or theft. I have lost stuff before and find this is fail-safe although it requires a little more time.
Beth, thanks. I have the emails I sent you. I’ve collected them. I also invested in an external hard drive. Will has it and he’s transferring files from “crashed” hard drive. It wasn’t really crashed, it just needed a simple repair which he did.
He’s sending me back the two hard drives and recommended I install the internal and back up to it and the external.
Ruby, I did get and external hard drive. See comments to Beth. I will be backing everything to it when I get it back plus saving in google docs, which Travis Fox at raincrow games recommends.
Weekend Cowgirl. I’m not sure I can store one off site, but hopefully between the cloud saving and the hard drives, I will be safe in the future.
Thanks for commenting.