Public Service Announcement-Word of Warning--Shout Out

... glad to hear everything worked out. Kudos on the requests.
And let's hope the publishers don't go requesting additional formats from you:
jpeg or Excel versions of the manuscript ;-)

I imagine your initial "help me!" post was one long chunk of gibberish and typed screaming. Very happy it got sorted out for you.

I email myself all the various versions, as well as having them on HD and an external. I <3 unlimited storage.

Ooh, that would be terrifying. So glad Williebee was able to help you get them back.

Here's something to help calm your nerves:

Williebee is one of my favorite people in the world. We hung out last year at Killer Nashville, stayed in touch ever since, and he's one of the reasons I'm looking so forward to the event again this summer.

He's funny, generous, and he knows things. Lots of things.

And he's a really good writer!

And Kevin, yay! for your requests and yay! that it got all sorted out! (And yay! for being a neatfreak. I understand.)

Yay! Williebee FTW!

Yay for Kevin getting multiple requests from publishers!

Emailing your self a daily version of you ms. is easy and not a bad multiple backup strategy at all.

Get a free Google or Yahoo email account, and just use it for backup. Email your ms. as an attachment.

Medievalist said:

Emailing your self a daily version of you ms. is easy and not a bad multiple backup strategy at all.

Get a free Google or Yahoo email account, and just use it for backup. Email your ms. as an attachment.

Click to expand...

QFT. I do this at the end of every work day.

*notes to self to email manuscripts*

Big up to Williebee!

and big up to Kevin for manuscript request!

WWWHHHooooottt!!

I'm really glad to hear that.

*whew*

One time I almost lost a 7 page research paper I wrote when the brother started up the computer without telling me.

That was bad.

At least i had the hard copy.

Kevin, I celebrate anything! So I say celebrate you got that request. Yep, AW is great, and williebee helping you out like that is phenomenal. <Whew> Thanks for the reminder about saving. There will always be the time when we forget and delete.

Now I'm off to celebrating that things are okay now for you.

I am glad Williebee was able to help you, Kevin. I, too, save multiple copies of everything. My original MS never gets touched once I write it. It's not even in proper MS format. The file name is always called First Draft and I make a copy as soon as I'm done called Second Draft and so on and so forth.

We also have a program called iBackup that runs all the time. It backs up my files any time a change is made. I've not needed to restore anything yet, but those copies are there if I need them.

And Williebee, if you are reading this, thank you for being an awesome help to another AWer!

You're most welcome. Happy to help.

Yup, backups, backups and backups of backups.

One note on that, and why a gmail/google docs type of solution is useful? Separate locations.

A back up in a different folder on the computer, or even one kept inside the house? Well that's kind of like having a spare set of keys in your glove box. It's nice to have it close at hand, but not much help when the place is on fire or you're locked out.

Yay for Kevin & Willebee and hope it sells, Kevin!

I had gotten up to 40k words or so and one day decided on a whim to clean up my computer... Somehow I was storing the file someplace it wasn't supposed to be and got deleted... I ended up losing close to 20k words. That depressed me bad. I ended up starting to email myself, and saving to a thumb.
Yeah it happens.... At least you still had the one version. Converting from one format to another ain't so bad. If you had lost the whole thing or a significant portion you would have really been hating life. Good times it worked out relatively painless.