By Christine Thackeray
This week I experienced the blue screen of death for the first time. My sons laughed and said it happens every once in a while, but they hadn't lost fifteen pages of brilliant work. (No, I hadn't saved for the last hour.) (Okay, so maybe it just felt brilliant but we'll never know because it's LOST forever.) Even after rebooting the computer I couldn't trust it so I forced my husband down to the electronics section of Costco to blow part of our tax return and got a new computer. (Yeah!)
Still, it got me thinking about how I save my work. I know some people use flash drives but they damage so easily. My husband has an external drive that he uses but if ever he was unavailable and I had to access anything on it, well, it wouldn't happen. Two USEFUL options that I've found help is if I mail my manuscript to myself intermittantly. This way it's saved in both my outlook files and on the MSN external server. My husband has also installed an application called "dropbox" and by dumping my manuscript in there, I'm able to access it from any computer.
It only takes once to turn a casual save button clicker into an avid backer-upper.
So how do you back up your files?
This week I experienced the blue screen of death for the first time. My sons laughed and said it happens every once in a while, but they hadn't lost fifteen pages of brilliant work. (No, I hadn't saved for the last hour.) (Okay, so maybe it just felt brilliant but we'll never know because it's LOST forever.) Even after rebooting the computer I couldn't trust it so I forced my husband down to the electronics section of Costco to blow part of our tax return and got a new computer. (Yeah!)
Still, it got me thinking about how I save my work. I know some people use flash drives but they damage so easily. My husband has an external drive that he uses but if ever he was unavailable and I had to access anything on it, well, it wouldn't happen. Two USEFUL options that I've found help is if I mail my manuscript to myself intermittantly. This way it's saved in both my outlook files and on the MSN external server. My husband has also installed an application called "dropbox" and by dumping my manuscript in there, I'm able to access it from any computer.
It only takes once to turn a casual save button clicker into an avid backer-upper.
So how do you back up your files?
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1 comments:
I e-mail to myself, save it onto a flash drive and when a substantial chunk of the work is complete I save it onto a disk.
As you can tell, I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to computers and saving my work.
That "drop box" thing sounds like a really good idea.
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