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Post by moonmomma on Jun 19, 2010 22:03:36 GMT -5
Just a reminder, this comes up regularly on writers' message boards when someone has lost the novel they were working on (also, with alarming frequency, on scrapbooking message boards when someone has lost all their digital photos  ): back up your work! (and your photos, and anything else important, too.) When I'm writing a first draft, I back up every day; when I'm revising, I back up each chapter when I finish typing in the changes. I recommend backing up in at least two different places. E-mail your files to yourself, upload them to Google Docs, use an online storage service, put them on flash drives, external hard drives, zip disks (remember those?), print out a hard copy. I upload to Google Docs and copy to a flash drive. For my photos, I upload them to Kodak Gallery and burn them to CDs. I back up my websites to a Zip disk. Back up your stuff, or sooner or later you'll wish you had! |
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Post by plasticat on Jun 22, 2010 19:42:09 GMT -5
I completely agree with this. I unfortunately learned this the hard way (I lost several stories, including the original version of Population: 200, when the site they were on closed down, and a fanfiction story I had spontaneously vanished from my computer) and I hope that no one else on here has to go through losing a piece of their hard work.
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Post by moonmomma on Jun 22, 2010 20:11:24 GMT -5
I completely agree with this. I unfortunately learned this the hard way (I lost several stories, including the original version of Population: 200, when the site they were on closed down, and a fanfiction story I had spontaneously vanished from my computer) and I hope that no one else on here has to go through losing a piece of their hard work. Good point, plasticat - don't think it's safe just because it's posted online! The old Crosswinds web hosting service shut down, making a number of fanfics linked from a site i used to visit disappear, and now Geocities, and the sites that were hosted there, has gone the same way. I back up my websites on Zip disk, just in case I wake up one day and Angelfire has shut down. i've actually been lucky, i've still got a lot of stuff i wrote on an old pre-windows computer, that has gone from 5" to 3" floppy disks to my current computer without too much of the text files turning to gibberish. The writing isn't very good, but at least i've still got the ideas. I back those up too. |
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Post by moonmomma on Jul 16, 2010 15:46:21 GMT -5
don't just back up your current projects - i just finished backing up all my old unfinished novels and story fragments. because you never know when a dead story is going to come back to life! EDIT - and, oh my, i found my Very Firstest Novel in one of those folders!!!  *faints* i knew i still had it somewhere, but only as a printout, didn't know i still had the computer files. from 20 years ago!!!! it's gone through 4 or 5 computers, who knows how many different kinds of discs and formats... amazing it still exists! it's all backed up now, and maybe one day i'll even post it if i get the courage O.o EDIT again: wow, i had forgotten about some of these O.o there's a short story in there that i'd been thinking about resurrecting and posting ;D even got some good comments from the teacher of the sf/f writing workshop i took a few times at the community college ;D |
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): back up your work! (and your photos, and anything else important, too.) When I'm writing a first draft, I back up every day; when I'm revising, I back up each chapter when I finish typing in the changes.
