Backing up your stories

[Linxe Termoil]

Aloha everyone and season's greetings,

 

I wasn't sure where to put this so I thought I would put it here.

 

My motherboard and or hard drive crashed on my laptop Saturday morning and as of right now it is currently unknown whether or not I will be able to recover anything from the harddrive itself. I'm hoping it's just the motherboard.

 

Because of the fact that I could end up losing everything I have on my harddrive I would just like to take this time to remind everyone that is in the process of writing a story or stories that they should take the time to backup their files, along with any editting suggestions, etcetera. Also be sure to backup copies of anything else that you want backed up, like movies, pictures, music, etcetera. (My mom is ticked cause I might lose all the photos she had taken of her trip to arkansas and arizona, etcetera)

 

I am lucky in the fact that I will be able to recover most of my stories, since David McLeod, Rush, Benji, and a few other folks all have copies of my story, or they are sitting in the PM system of GA itself.

 

If you are unsure how to back up your stories I recommend you go to your local Wal-greens, radioshack, best buy, or wal-mart store and buy a flash drive. They range anywhere from 10 to 40 dollars and have varying sizes. (I.E. Gigobytes, megabytes, etcetera). You can also back up your stories on CD.

 

While it is an inconvenience when one's computer crashes or goes down, it would be an even bigger inconvenience if one lost all their projects. It is also an inconvenience when one loses over three hundred dollars worth of downloaded music and other stuff.

 

 

That all being said, I will be (hopefully) back on GA, with everything up and running like normal here within a couple of weeks, as soon as I get my laptop back. (Best buy takes forever, thankfully i'm still under warranty).

 

 

Just some advice from a friendly neighborhood victim (of pure bad luck).

 

Regards,

 

Linxe Termoil

Edited September 21, 2009 by Linxe Termoil

[Nephylim]

You'd think I'd learn. I have almost lost everything three times so far.... thank the gods for a friend who is a computer genius and has saved me from spilled coffee... virus and cat attack. Do I back up... erm... *becomes shifty... sometimes...* It is really really really stupid not to though.

[Phantom]

I've had the problem before, where I did end up loosing everything, so now I back everything up to an external drive that I have (a 1 Terrabyte Western Digital USB drive from Staples for around a hundred or so) and I also have my stories and such synced between my laptop and my desktop, so if one goes down I have to back up copies.

 

Before I learned to sync my files (kinda complicated but there are how-to's on the internet that can explain it easier then I can lol) I used to keep everything on a usb flash drive, until I kept forgetting to back things up and such. Also another nifty way of keeping things backed up is to put them on a 'cloud.' By that I mean you can use a service like Google Docs which will store things online for you and also give you the added benefit of not having to install software AND be able to use any computer to access them (really handy if you use more then one computer like I do).

 

While both things do have there benefits, they do have some features that are missing (notably the grammer check that Office provides e.g. my submission of Big Valley in the sneak peak section was written on Google Docs, but the grammer check was nowhere to be found).

 

Those are my 2 cents

 

Eric

[TalonRider]

As an editor, I use flash drives for the stories that I work on. From time to time, I do back them up on an external drive that I have.

 

My authors also know that I keep their stories so they can contact me for a copy when needed.

[JamesSavik]

Flash drives are indispensable. They are cheap, have much space, are very reliable and allow you to switch from desktop to laptop in a... flash. *groans*

[kitten]

Being rather paranoid, when I'm working on the computer I back up all new and updated files to a second internal drive every couple of hours. Every night I back up all data files to the second internal drive and every weekend I do a complete clone of my main disk to an external drive. At least 3 times per year I put encrypted copies of my most important files onto DVDs and send them to a friend on the other side of the country - just in case al my drives at home get destroyed in a fire or flood.

 

Kit

[rec]

Being lazy and having two computers in my home network, I found Windows Live Sync (free) the easiest way to back up and synchronize my files. Every time save a file in a designated folder, the file is automatically updated on the other computer.

 

Mindless and wonderful. Of course, if you screw up a file and save it, you'd better be quick to make sure it doesn't overwrite your file on the other computer. That's why from time to time I freeze a copy of a story with another name -- which gets backed up automtically.

 

There are internet storage services that do the same thing, but with Live Sync I know the files are on my own computer.

[TalonRider]

Flash drives are indispensable. They are cheap, have much space, are very reliable and allow you to switch from desktop to laptop in a... flash. *groans*

They are good for going from one computer to another.

 

But I do have one setting on my desk at work that went bad.

[Hoskins]

I'm an IT guy and I think the combination of something like Time Machine on a Mac (Vista's backup is pretty good too) and online backup (carbonite) is pretty solid. I'm not a writer, but I am an amateur genealogist, and there's a lot of "stuff" that is pretty valuable. Time Machine/backup is great for reverting back to older versions (I mean, its backing up every hour, that's awesome), and Carbonite is great protection against physical loss.

 

Flash drives are a little, just a little, more reliable than the old floppy disks used to be. CD's and DVD's get scratches or the materials separate and they die. Basically, I don't trust anything valuable to a device worth less than ten bucks.

 

And don't get me started on archival storage of digital media...

 

Linxe, I hope you get all your data back. It's a bummer to lose a drive.

 

H

[PlugInMatty]

I back up when I can be bothered, which isn't nearly as often as I should.

 

But since reading this thread, I've just backed everything up onto my external hard drive haha

 

Good luck, Linxe!

 

 

[Phantom]

I forgot to mention (and I'm gonna go repent to the Linux gods for saying this) but if you use Windows Live, there is an online drive service called Windows Live Skydrive that you can get for free. It's 25gigs of free storage that's uploaded and always available (provided the internet/M$ doesn't crash).

 

Also to seed some rumor, a few tech sites that I browse say that Google is going to be providing online storage like Windows Live Skydrive in the future, possibly when Chrome OS is released.

 

Either way, you can't loose

[David McLeod]

I use the program, WinZIP, to compress and encrypt files, and simply write them to a CD which I then take to a friend's house. It's cheap, it's off site, it's secure.

[Duncan Ryder]

My tech guy (I am soooo not a techie) set up what I think is a delightfully simple system . I have an external hardrive (about the size of a deck of cards) plugged into the back of my computer. Then I've got this software called "second copy" which is set up to automatically back up ALL my files every evening. Not just all my office files but also photos,email, even my ITunes. I don't have to think about it at all.

[Emulated]

Damn! I'm sorry to hear that Linxe. I hope you managed to recover those files!

 

As for me, well, I back up every five minutes. Don't worry, it's an automatic thing, but it works like a charm. Better still, it archives the file every time, so if I accidentally delete a paragraph, I can get that back. Oh, and it's online, so it's pretty safe there too.

 

If that fails then I guess an email to Talon is in order!

[DomLuka]

ouch! sorry to hear that, can completely relate. my editor has saved my life before after losing everything. Not only did he have what I needed, but also pretty much everything else he ever edited for me.

[colinian]

I use Genie Backup Manager Pro from Genie-Soft. It's set to backup every new and changed file every night... uh... morning at 3 a.m. to an external 1TB NAS drive and to a 500GB USB drive. It keeps the last 3 versions of every file, and backs up open data and Outlook files.

 

I'm not paranoid, I'm just sure my hard drive is out to get me.

 

Colin