We’ve heard about it before: the fiction writer whose car was vandalized and they stole his laptop–with THE ONLY COPY OF HIS NOVEL ON IT.
The next beat is always the same: author kicks himself around the block, desperate pleas go out to the anonymous vandals, a reward is offered. But it’s all for nothing. Gone. Three years work, gone.
That might have been me last night. Suddenly, without warning or explanation, the hard drive of my trusty Macbook started making strange clicking noises. Everything slo-o-owed down. Then I could no longer access the Internet.
I know enough about computers to realize what was happening. But apparently not enough about my own bad habits to have backed up regularly. If I had, the incident would have been a nuisance, but not a life crisis.
Happily, there were 2 factors in my favor…
• I own three other computers.
• The disk was dying, but not quite dead yet–in fact it’s still limping along as I write this (on another computer), and I’ve been able to make quick backups of the folders I consider crucial. Tomorrow, it goes to the Genius Bar (Windows users, that’s a little Mac in-joke.)
What’s amazing, as well as depressing, is this: the whole thing happened to me once before, about 5 years ago, and at that time I did NOT have any form of backup, not even casual, and I lost everything.
Wouldn’t you think that, once bit…? Oh, never mind. Maybe twice bit will turn out to be the charm. But here’s the point–and I’ll put it in the form of 3 questions:
Are you working on a serious piece of writing? Is your work adequately backed up? Can you afford to lose it all, suddenly?
As the reformed rockers say on TV, “Don’t be like me.” At least send it to your Gmail account, which will hold almost infinite amounts of text, free of charge, probably forever.
What? You don’t have a Gmail account? Go to
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Okay, I swear I’m not a techie, but I challenge you to go to http://getdropbox.com, watch the quick video, and not salivate. So simple. Easy. Hands-off. It’s exactly what I need. Thousands of people are lined up and begging for beta codes.
I can’t wait until its release.
(Minus the comma in the link. How did that happen?)
http://getdropbox.com
(I swear I’m not affiliated, LOL.)