by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
Sunday I walked into my home office to pay some bills and found Spec Ops Cat had gifted me with a hairball – on my finished taxes on the desk. Not a tragedy, my CPA filed my returns electronically two weeks ago so this was the paper copy, but point taken. The open laptop right next to it survived unscathed. One never knows when a hairball or computer crash might happen.
Having “worked for the government” I am paranoid about multiple backups. The rule of three backups with one being off-site is never far from my mind. I don’t even erase my photo memory cards after they are on my computer, I keep them as archives.
I use Carbonite online to backup my computer automatically and I put everything on thumb drives too, plus I have an external hard drive which backs up my computer. No, I’m not using the Cloud yet, but I’ve toyed with Dropbox, but I want my files with me so we shall see about the whole Cloud concept.
My paranoia goes back to my Army logistics training I think – if you don’t have it with you, you don’t have it – that applies to food, fuel, toilet paper and digital photos and documents. A burned CD copy of my book is in my fire safe and still riding around in my car.
Adding photos and videos into the backup equation besides my writing documents increases the memory needs. My first computer used 5 1/4 inch disks and had no hard drive. Now we are all overwhelmed with trying to preserve our digital memories and work to avoid a catastrophic digital disaster. Maybe using some old school ways of burying some DVDs or thumb drives in the backyard might be cool again.
With taxes over for this year, it’s a good time to consider keeping our writing, photos, videos, legal and financial documents safe. Protect yourself and your writing – backup now. Who knows what our pets are plotting for the rest of the year!
Thanks for the wake-up call, Spec Ops Cat! When I decided to republish my first romance as an ebook, the only electronic version I had was on a 5 1/4 floppy disk. Had an interesting time linking three computers to communicate with each other and get a file my PC recognized. (:
One of my clients experienced a computer crash just after she’d received a “send me more” email from an agent . . . and she didn’t have a backup of the book she’s been writing for two years! She was lucky: the computer geeks were able to recover about 95% of her files, but it was a lesson to me to have multiple backups. Paranoid? Maybe? Crying? Not if I can help it!
All this “new-fangled” technology makes my head spin!