Where Tech Meets Take Your Own Advice

Author/podcaster extraordinaire Mur Lafferty just posted a video podcast about the tools every writer should have, and one of the things she mentioned was an external backup drive.  A flash drive, external hard drive, Google Docs--it's not important what you use, so long as you're backing up everything.  Most writers know this, and all techies know it.  But here's the dirty little secret:

Most of us don't do it.

It's simple.  It doesn't take long.  But we don't do it.

And now the obligatory horror story:  It's the Fall 2007 semester.  Midterm week.  I'm almost finished with my final projects.  My hard drive has been flaky for about a week, but I keep putting off backing it up until after midterms when I have more time.  I'm in the middle of copying the files onto a flash drive so I can print them off in a computer lab, and that's when the computer blue screens and dies.  Shit.

Figuring that not all is lost, I buy an adapter and hook it up to Melissa's computer.  The hard drive is detected!  Fantastic.  Maybe it'll be okay.

File type: RAW.  As far as Windows is concerned, this means: "oh man, there sure are a lot of ones and zeroes on this thing.  But what does it all mean?"  In other words, all is lost.

Luckily, I was saved by a small miracle--the drive was partitioned, and all my music was on the D: partition, which I was able to rescue through the magic of chkdsk.  I found a program called Zero Authority Recovery that claimed to be able to recover the gibberish in the other partition, and it was able to save only one folder--Documents and Settings.  It didn't get everything, but it got most of the important stuff.  I made it through the wreck with some minor cuts and bruises, but I was okay.

The experience was an awakening.  I have an external 80 gig drive that's just been sitting around, so I pledged to back up religiously when I got my new laptop.  Take a guess at how many times I've updated my backup since I got this one over a year ago.

That's right.  Not-a-once.  A mistake I plan to remedy.

And for the rest of you: if you haven't already started keeping a backup, start.  And if the words of Mur, myself, and the countless others who have suffered hard drive crashes (chances are, you know a few of them) fail to get through to you, you're a hopeless case.  Which is probably okay.  Hard drive crashes are pretty rare to begin with, and with storage tech getting more and more reliable (some flash drives are nigh indestructible) it's possible that you'll never deal with a crash that will destroy everything you've worked on.

If you're okay with the risk, fair enough.  But fellow writers--and especially fellow college students--I beg you.  Back up your files.

Because I won't feel sorry for you later if you lose everything.  And I won't fix your computer, either.