A Hard Lesson Learned: Backing up your Work

A Hard Lesson Learned: Backing up your Work

There is nothing worse in the world than sitting at your trusty computer, turning it on only to find out that it has crashed-- except maybe finding out that your backup is lost too. This has happened to me not once, not twice, but several times.

I suppose it is my own fault for not backing up my work often. I had cavalierly disregarded the sanctity of the good old trusty pen and paper in favor of shiny new technology, not thinking twice of the consequences. The first time it happened it completely derailed my efforts in completing my first book which I had spent probably over three hundred hours on. We had also moved and my only backup copy was a disk which I had lost in the shuffle of moving nearly 3000 miles across the country. I was only 17 at the time so such a loss to me was devastating. Fast forward a couple of years, to the second time. This time I thought I was being smart and I backed up everything on my flash drive. I thought that would be good enough. Big mistake!

Not only did the computer that stored all of my work crash, so did my flash drive. I had given up on my second book and moved on to the third when… you guessed it my flash drive did it again. It took another few years before I was able to hire a special Data-Recovery Specialist to recover the lost data from my flash drive. I had him look at my hard drive-- and unfortunately that will cost a pretty penny because now that technology is considered obsolete. Talk about making me feel old and I’m not even twenty-six yet! He retrieved the data but in a very stripped down state-- I didn’t care, though. All the words were there in the right order (save for paragraph indentions and a few garbled characters). I thought I couldn’t be luckier.

But then something great happened. Miracle of miracles! I found the disk with my first book on it. Since computers don’t come with disk drives anymore I had to go to the library to find a computer old enough to have one. I had to try three-- count that THREE-- computers with disk drives before one of them actually read the disk. I couldn’t believe it when I saw that over 200 pages of my book intact. I felt like crying-- okay maybe I did cry-- I’m a big crybaby anyways so there’s no shame in admitting it. Finally, I got my book back after not quite ten years of thinking it lost forever. It wasn’t all completely intact but it was enough to help me put my first book back together again.

So moral of the story is: back up your work often, AND back up your backup!

Thanks for listening to my rant. Please feel free to add your own stories or gripes about backing up your work.