Wednesday, April 11, 2018

PSA - Back Up Your Work

It's time again for another public service announcement about making sure you back up your work.  Why this morning?  Because I walked into the office this morning to Hubs computer in Safe Mode.  And while I was trying figure out WTF pre caffeine and nicotine, he realized that if his hard drive was toast, he'd lost a whole bunch of stuff. 

Now, understand something.  I am IT here at Sanderson Industries, Inc. LLC, so it's basically my job to take care of the computers.  And I dropped the ball.  I hadn't backed up either of the computers recently.  A fact that became clear as we were talking - while I was waiting for System Restore to do its job - about what he may have lost, it occurred to me that I hadn't backed up any of the spreadsheet stuff I've been doing that I hadn't already emailed to the office.  So, like 25 spreadsheets I created over the weekend had no backup.  Argh.  That would've sucked if a crash had happened to MY computer last night.

So, I got out the thumb drives and began backing up.  (System Restore fixed Hubs computer,. btw.  Whew.)  And I saw that I hadn't backed up my picture files since last June.  Derp. 

One would think I would've learned during The Great Computer Crash of 2006, wherein I lost all my picture files in one fell swoop of the dead hard drive. 

I don't lose manuscript files.  I back up my books every night I've worked on them by emailing them to my gmail acct.  Blurbs, cover art, etc.?  That stuff would've been toast. 

It's all backed up to a thumb drive now.  Later today, I'll take this thumb drive to the bank and put it in our safe deposit box, retrieve the one already there and back up to that, too. 

Always have one full backup with you and one offsite - in case of flood, fire, tornado, etc.

Anyway, let this be a reminder to you, too.  If you haven't backed up lately, make time to do it today.  If your computer crashes overnight, you'll be so glad you did.  And if it doesn't?  Then you can breathe a sigh of relief that you're safe for another day.

Peace out.

2 comments:

  1. I have Carbonite. It backs up to the cloud daily, except for what I do in Scrivener. That backs up every 10 seconds to Dropbox. I, too, have killed hard drives. It sucks. But a good reminder!

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  2. Yikes! Good reminder!

    I back up every day while I'm writing, but I haven't backed up since I started editing. Derp.

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