Losing Everything

Two words that can cause great dread to a writer, published or not.

These two words refer to the fact that someone has lost every piece of writing they ever had. It happens and if we haven’t guarded ourselves, then it is almost like the end of life.

So far it has not happened to me, however, I have heard of it happening. Not to anyone I personally know, but via reports that have stuck with me.

The first time I heard of writers losing their work was as the result of a major, and deadly, bushfire here in Victoria (Australia). We’ve had a few and I am not certain. The writers concerned lived in a bushy area to the north-east of Melbourne. I read the story in a writer’s magazine that they had kept all their writing in paper format. They had not made any back-up copies at all, either physical or electronic. The second was a recent online post where a person lost everything, they had written due to a computer glitch that reset their hard-drive without the facility to recall anything on the drive.

The first story reinforced my need to have backups of my work. Therefore, I began to copy everything to an external hard-drive. Nowadays I use an external hard-drive that I access from my computer. I also backup this external drive often, thus giving me two sets of files. That particular backup goes with me whenever I leave the house, most times. It also makes it easier to access if I happen to be away from my desktop.

A lot of people will say backup to the cloud. Yes, it may be very secure, but I choose to use a physical drive still. It doesn’t matter on what, or to where, you backup, it is important to backup your work. Having hard copies can be time and space consuming, but they can look good if you have a stack of manuscripts piled up in the corner.

Everyone is different. Everyone is unique. Find your happy place where you know your precious brain exports are safe and secure.