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Back It Up

The other night I was working late on a particularly difficult scene, and as is now my habit I stopped about an hour in to back up three times (once to my hard drive, once to Dropbox, and once to a memory stick.) It annoyed me to have to do that, as I was just starting to get the scene to work. I even thought "Why am I backing up during writing sessions when I can do it later?"

The universe heard me, because five minutes later everything suddenly died, and I was left sitting in complete darkness. I sat and waited for the power to come back on so I could recover my files. But the power didn't come back on, so eventually I had to go to bed.

We didn't get service restored for another five hours, as it turns out. When I went to reboot my computer, which is getting a bit old now, I thought of what might happen if the outtage had fried it. I have a backup laptop for work, but I haven't been copying my files to it since last summer. All I had of the last three weeks of work I've done was on that memory stick and in Dropbox.

Moral of the story: back it up during writing sessions. Create multiple copies and save them in different locations. Also, never prod the universe to answer your idiot questions.

Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay

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nightsmusic said…
Yup, I backup to four different places and I also have auto-save on my Windows Word set to save every three minutes so, should something crash, at least I'll not have too much to make up when I reopen the document. I've been burned before. Not again.

And no question is idiot! ;)
April 29, 2020 at 11:54 AM
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