A Good Thing

[rowyn]

On the bright side, my computer was unharmed by the repeated surges prior to the power outage, which is good because I hadn't done a new backup in a couple of months. ^.^;;

Funny. The last two months' worth of Prophecy writing represents maybe 40 hours of work, if that. And having written it once already, writing it down again would probably take even less time.

Whereas it would take me a few hundred hours at my Toddler Bank job to pay for a drainage system in the basement

Yet the thought of spending all that money to fix the basement is far less troubling to me than the thought of having to re-write the last several chapters of Prophecy.

I'll go make that backup now.

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

See? Wise and prudent.

===|==============/ Level Head

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Ack! I shudder at the thought of you losing all of Prophecy. And I haven't been dutifully keeping copies on my hard drive, either.

(Hmm. I suppose if you need an "off-site back-up", you could send me the work-in-progress in a .zip file, and I could tuck it away in some sub-directory.)

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

Heh... several important projects... like:

The Skies Have No Memories
Maid On the Shore
and
Daf's Story,...

I emailed em all to myself at hotmail. and left em in the inbox over there. It a) means I can work on em anytime from anywhere and b) I have back up copies if anything happens

Finished works I simply burn to CD as soon as they're finished. It's part of the whole ritual of 'c'est complet'

[jamesb]

Backups are a good idea.

Sitting next to my computer at the moment is a crashed hard drive out of a laptop. About once a month I make another attempt at recovering the data from that drive, but except for one time late last year when the drive actually powered up for almost 30 seconds, my attempts have been in vain.

You see, amongst the lost embroidery patterns, emails, and Windows 95 system files, somewhere on that drive's lifeless platters is also the only copy of an almost completed novel. The writer of that novel is still so traumatized by its loss, that in the year since that drive failed, she still hasn't been able to face the prospect of starting the novel all over again.

[rowyn]

Yeek. That's the sort of thing I've always dreaded. I've seldom kept the weekly backups that I've wanted to, but all my writings have been backed-up multiple times during the time that I'm working on them.

Glen Cook writes all of his books out longhand. He's finished at least one novel in a notebook, and then never been able to find the notebook since. :( I'm glad I've never been one for handwriting stuff!

[rowyn]

Well, I was never in any danger of losing all of it. The last backup I had made did have the first, oh, 22 months' worth of work. It was only the last two months that could potentially get lost. strangess has most of the files, too. And I have a CD copy at work of most of it. There's the potential to lose some of the novel to catastrophic failure, but the odds are excellent that I wouldn't lose all of it. :)