We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post to bring you well… probably one of the worst things that can happen to a writer. My computer crashed taking everything with it.
It’s a very very long story, that encompasses a lot more detail than just that it crashed, but suffice it to say, there’s a lesson to be learned in all of this.
I’ve known for a very long time that I need to back up my computer as often as possible, but for whatever reason I’ve been sort of lax on this fact. I’ve sort of just tried to ignore it thinking that nothing’s going to happen, because I had gone a very very long time without this kind of disaster and then… as it often does… the unthinkable happened. Suddenly I found myself staring at a screen that told me that my only option was to save as many files as I could (funny seeing as how I couldn’t even get to it) then erase the entire harddrive and start over. Oh is that all? I thought. Just erase the entire thing, and start fresh. Amusingly I had actually thought about erasing my harddrive and starting fresh but at the time I had wanted to actually do so on my terms. Ensuring that every single last thing I could possibly need was saved. Still… it could have been far worse and so in a lot of ways I’m very lucky and very thankful that it wasn’t. Needless to say I will be backing up my computer a lot more frequently from now on, because the truth is, you just never know when a technological disaster will strike, and it’s good to have everything backed up just in case.
OUCH! My sympathy – have been there in the past when a nasty Trojan told me that my computer’s harddrive had failed. Luckily it wasn’t true and – after many hours of reboots etc – I did get everything back. (So, check that your harddrive is REALLY kaput).
One thing I now do is to email my writing to myself every so often. If you attach files and use web-based services like Hotmail then it means your documents are backed up on Microsoft’s servers!
That’s smart. Mine wasn’t a virus though, I screwed up. It’s ok, and thankfully I think I got back almost everything.
Back-ups. Must remember. What a nightmare.
Right?