Saving Your Work

Back up and running but I had a computer problem that could have been a disaster. Fortunately, I am an inveterate saver so I had backups of all my work. I bought a new laptop and was up and running again in minutes.

If you’re not backing up your work, here are a few tips that will help you get started.

·         The old fashioned way - Print. It can’t hurt for you to keep a hard copy of your work. The downside is if your story is “in process.” That means your hard copy is stale after a day or two and you have to make another copy to keep it current.

·         Second computer - if you have a second computer, you can easily email yourself a copy of your work.

·         “The Cloud” - Google and others offer data storage housed at a secure location. It costs.

·         USB flash drives - by far my favorite. I carry a flash drive with me everywhere I go. It has the complete writing files from my computer. They are cheap and some can hold gigabytes of data. A friend needed a copy of my book for a review and I wasn’t close to home. I headed to Kinko’s and emailed it to him. Complete in less than ten minutes.

·         Spare hard drive - external or internal, a mirrored drive is a good idea. Copy to your internal drive then to your external.

·         Online backup - There are dozens of companies that specialize in online backup. Most run in the background. Mozy, Carbonite, Livedrive, Idrive, the list is endless.

·         Some of the old ways include: ZIP drives, DVD, and DVR.

Oh, don’t just save your writing. Save your contact list from email, the favorites list from whatever program you use to explore the internet and any other file that might be hard to recreate.

Whatever method you choose, use it or eventually you will lose it.