look alive, sunshine

dduane:

ndcirque:

bruneburg:

bruneburg:

beastly reminder

Almost. Years ago my computer suddenly stopped working and lost everything on it. Fortunately a relatively recent backup still existed bc of my family, a recent parts switch, and dumb luck. But last year a friend of mine got hacked and lost close to everything he had done creatively in the last 17-ish years. Art. Novels in progress. Entire conlangs. DnD character Sheets. Music he had made. All gone. He never backed any of it up. Few months later I started this habit (or ritual, almost) of drawing a reminder beast any time I would make a full complete backup. In hopes that seeing these things might remind others and myself. (Another factor here is that I am an animator and some of the stuff on my computer took literal years to make. And the film university I go to urges us to take this stuff seriously, too.)

There’s an old saying in the computer world.

• There are two kinds of people
• Those who have lost everything because of a drive failure
• And those that are GOING TO lose everything because of a drive failure

That is why you back up your stuff. It isn’t if, it’s when. If it isn’t drive failure, it’s going to be malware, or ransomeware, or a battery that fails and destroys your laptop, or a lightning strike that destroys your system, or a house fire/flood/earthquake, or simple theft of your device, the list is as long as your arm. Someday you WILL have a problem that eats all of your data. Then the only thing that will save your a** will be backups. Personally I have three levels; TimeMachine, back up to the cloud, and a drive that I back everything up to once a month and keep in the fireproof safe.

Back up your stuff.

(That includes your phone and tablet too)

This.

Don’t get me started about the time I was 75% finished with Spock’s World when lightning struck a transformer in our little housing estate, and the resulting surge (and/or EMP) fried my computer and rendered all my backups corrupt. So that I had to write the entire front end of the book again (possibly a blessing in disguise, tbh, some good things did come up in that rewrite…) and then finish the book—another 20K words or so—all in two weeks. (Which is when the MS was due at the publisher, and there was no wiggle room.)

So, happy ending: I walked on water and it got done. But lessons learned: (a) Never write a book in two weeks in a straight-backed chair. My back has never been quite the same.

(b) Back up in several different ways, on-site and off. …These days I’m really pleased with Backblaze, which backs up constantly and invisibly in the background, and not in any weird proprietary format: just plain old files in directories. (Need a specific file? No need to download an entire backup: just reach up into the cloud-based directory and pull that one file down.)

I also back up to local hard media, and additionally I compile working projects into other cloud-based backup areas (Dropbox, etc), as well as to ebook format files (.epub usually) that I store in the iPad. These can be recovered and other-formatted, if necessary, using Calibre, but are also really handy to edit from, especially if you’re using the native reader on the iPad: you make notes in the ebook and transcribe them to your working file later.

…Honestly, if you do any serious work on a computer: back that shit up. You won’t need it until YOU NEED IT. And sooner or later, you will.

(Oh, and if you’re old-school and write in notebooks: scan them and save the scans somewhere secure. …This means you, @petermorwood!)