Always back-up your work, preferably off-site!
Like I said in this post, I usually take my time reading my beloved Poets & Writers magazine. Well, today I read an article that shook me to the bone.
The article was an expose on writer Andrew Porter and detailed any writer’s worst nightmare. After working tirelessly on a collection of short stories, he lost everything. Here’s a quick excerpt that tells about Porter coming home from a friend’s house:
When he returned home, around one in the morning, his apartment had been ransacked. "Everything was gone," Porter remembers, "my stereo, my CDs, my clothes, my computer, my disks with all my backed-up stories, even the little briefcase where I kept all of my hard copies. In other words, everything I’d written that year, almost everything I’d ever written, was gone." (Poets & Writers Nov/Dec 2008 107-8).
Yikes! That is very scary. Even the hard copies were taken! Needless to say, it took Porter a while to recover from this incident and he almost gave up on writing altogether.
But there’s a lesson to this story, which I hope is pretty obvious: Back-up your work, and do it off-site! That way, if your home does get burglarized, you can still recover all of your work. Think of this as a Brad’s Reader Public Service Announcement.
There are many services out there that will back up your computer data via the internet and store it for you off-site. Many of these services are free, or cost very little, depending on how much data you want saved. One popular service I have heard good things about is Mozy, which gives the basic user free storage, up to 2GB (enough for most writers, I’d imagine).
I have my own system of back my data up off-site. For security reasons, I won’t detail it here, but if all my computer hardware were to be stolen/damaged, I’d still have access to all my writing. So please, for the sake of your sanity, and the well-being of your hard work, back-up your work off-site! You might never need it, but if you do, thank goodness it’s there!
Brad’s Note: I’m in no way being compensated for suggesting Mozy as a back-up service. I have heard good things about them, but every user experience may vary.
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