A Reminder to Back Up Your Work.

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NykeYoung

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I had a hard-drive crash last Friday.

I back up to a flash drive irregularly. However, out of 20,400 words, I only lost about 700, or 3.5% of the work.

So back up your work! Making up 700 words lost is a whole lot better than making up 20,400!
 

Nymtoc

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Yep, without question. However, even backups can fail. I once had to reformat my hard drive but first made sure that everything important was backed up. When I began reinstalling my files, I found that one of my flash drives was empty--in other words, it had failed. I lost several important files that way.

Now I back up everything in at least two ways, by means of a flash drive or disk and also--automatically every few hours--to an external hard drive.

:)
 

inkkognito

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Excellent reminder! I've been rather paranoid lately because I'm working on a book with a tight deadline so it would be a major disaster if I lost the 30,000+ words I've managed to spit out so far. Twice a day I email the latest copy to my Gmail account (I have one set up just for archives manuscipts). I really need to copy it to my flash chip too as my laptop likes to spit out the Blue Screen of Death fairly regularly.
 
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Yup, back up, back up and back up again.

I was really glad about my back up paranoia when my previous computer's motherboard went tits-up. Yes, I'm mentioning it again - that's how important it is to save everything.

I now have everything saved onto:
  • My hard drive
  • All my documents (except for several gbs of music) fit onto a 4gb hard drive
  • I have my word documents, downloaded files (everything I'm sent over MSN or as email attachments) and my Prawn Cocktail folders (photos of the Letos, Colin Farrell, Joaquin Phoenix, etc) saved onto an SD card
  • Another, laughably small, 128mb pen drive holds all my word documents
  • I also save my word documents onto my mobile phone
Remind me to burn everything, everything, everything onto DVDs soon; I'm due for a complete disk back-up.

Oh, and I also email each chapter of my WIPs as I write them, to thethinker42.

You may have noticed my photos can go hang but I'm worried about losing my word documents. :D
 

Calla Lily

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Hard drive.
Flash drive.
Email to self (this puts it on Outlook and webmail at the same time)
Most important docs also on Norton's 1 gig of server backup that came with the program

I've been burned, can you tell? Paranoia isn't always a bad thing.

BACK UP YOUR STUFF!
 
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I sometimes wonder if we don't all get burned in minor ways to make us paranoid and that prevents bigger burnage in the future?

I had to pay £35 once to get my laptop cleaned up and had most files backed up but for the most recent 6,000 words of one particular WIP. It hurt, but I re-wrote them in a couple of days.

Paying £35 to get my computer up and running again hurt more though. :D
 

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I use LULU for family projects and proposed work. They keep a copy on their servers when you upload and this has saved me more than once.
 

tehuti88

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Still e-mailing myself all my writing to my Yahoo! Mail...ugh.

Today is taking longer than usual because Yahoo! refused to allow me to send one message, insisting there was "suspicious activity" in my account and it would not send it! Just for that one e-mail! It's an account of a dream I had--nothing suspect about it at all. I tried sending it from another Yahoo! e-mail address (got the same error message), as an attachment (ditto), from Outlook (it never arrived)...AGGGGHHH!! It's MY mail, let me use it! They let through Spam, but not my own message?? I do hope this is an isolated incident because...UGH I'm steamed. Ended up having to save it in Yahoo! Mail Notepad. Grrr.

I can't wait until I'm done, I'll feel so much better having it backed up somewhere away from the house, which could always catch fire or get destroyed by falling trees.
 

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I recommend online back-up systems such as Mozy.com or Carbonite.com. I use Mozy and it automatically updates files as I'm working on them.

I've lost a lot of stuff (two hard drive crashes in a year), and this has worked out to be the best solution for me.
 

JennaGlatzer

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I use an external hard drive, but I don't know how to set automatic back-ups, so I just do it manually every week or so-- but for me, that still means I could lose a lot of work. Can anyone tell me how to set up automatic backups simply?
 
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Mind if I eavesdrop?

I just got MS Office 2007 and apparently it has automatic back-up magicks in it, which I don't understand. I mean...you might make changes you later decide to delete, so...

I are confuzzled.
 

maestrowork

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I use an external hard drive, but I don't know how to set automatic back-ups, so I just do it manually every week or so-- but for me, that still means I could lose a lot of work. Can anyone tell me how to set up automatic backups simply?

Are you using Windows? If so, you can use its backup utility to set a backup schedule. For you, that would mean every day or even every hour.

If you're using the Mac, it has Time Machine that will back things up all the time. Or you can use BackUp to backup at any intervals you want.

All of them can back up to an external hard drive.
 

maestrowork

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Mind if I eavesdrop?

I just got MS Office 2007 and apparently it has automatic back-up magicks in it, which I don't understand. I mean...you might make changes you later decide to delete, so...

I are confuzzled.

Word's backup is a different thing. What it is: It automatically make backup copies of your files when you edit -- I think it backs up up to 5 versions. And if you've made changes you don't want, you can just restore an older version. Also, it prevents you from losing your changes (if the power goes off, or laptop crashes, etc.)

You still need a backup utility on Windows to do your real backup.
 
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*sigh*

I'm blonde, Ray. Speak slowly.

*cuddles her trusty pen drive and SD card*
 

thethinker42

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I had a hard-drive crash last Friday.

I back up to a flash drive irregularly. However, out of 20,400 words, I only lost about 700, or 3.5% of the work.

So back up your work! Making up 700 words lost is a whole lot better than making up 20,400!

Amen to that. I have 7 thumb drives (two of which are *always* with me), 2 external drives, plus my husband's computer and whatever I send to scarletpeaches. Paranoid? Yeah, a little. I seriously don't know what I'd do if I lost my work. Even losing a page or two once in a blue moon is enough to require a defibrillator.
 

JennaGlatzer

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Raaaaaaaaaay! Come baaaaaaaaaaack!

Damn. Now I'm going to be searching every little icon for something marked "backup utility."
 

Darzian

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[*]Another, laughably small, 128mb pen drive holds all my word documents


Where did you get that? 128 MB?

I use self-e-mail and MOZY online backup. It allows up to 2GB for free. Thats probably more than enough for everything I'll ever write in my life. Besides, the Internet can't fail so that's fairly safe. If it does fail then I'll just be one of billions suffering from the disaster.
 

benbradley

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Where did you get that? 128 MB?
Those are from the Jurrassic period of thumb drives and flash memory, probably about four or five years ago. They're being thrown into landfills daily, along with dot-matrix and daisywheel printers, vacuum tube radios, and other perfectly find but "hopelessly obsolete" technology. I was going to mention 8-track tape players as well, but they SHOULD be thrown away.
I use self-e-mail and MOZY online backup. It allows up to 2GB for free. Thats probably more than enough for everything I'll ever write in my life. Besides, the Internet can't fail so that's fairly safe. If it does fail then I'll just be one of billions suffering from the disaster.
The Internet CAN fail, or large parts of it could become inaccessible, but if that happens then many other disasterous things may have also happened. You don't want to think about it.

I do recall a story on Slashdot, there was some small country (Taiwan, maybe?) a year or two ago that gets most of its Internet bandwidth through a very few undersea cables. One or two of them failed, and access to any site outside the country was very slow to impossible (as well as for anyone outside the country wanting to access sites hosted inside the country). That's sort of a "bad design" of the infrastructure, they "should have had" more cables and redundancy, but it's an example of how the Internet can be messed up short of Global Thermonuclear War really, really bad things happening.

But a single backup site/service/business may well decide "We're not making any money at this, we don't expect to, and what's worse is we can't even convince the bank or any venture capitalist that we're going to make money someday" then all of a sudden you can't get to their website. You can only hope that some other business buys up the company's servers and puts the data online for people who need to do restores.
 

Sassee

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I back up my work in soooooooooooo many places.

1) gmail
2) dropbox
3) Google Docs
4) home desktop comp
5) home laptop comp x2
6) work comp
7) flash drive
8) various betas I email updates to

Yeah, I got my shit covered. Only thing I haven't done yet is print a paper copy (of the new version -- I have one for draft 1), but I'm going to sneak into work tomorrow to do that *whistles innocently*
 
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