Whew. That was close.
To all dear friends and readers, this is a reminder.
BACK UP YOUR WORK!
Also, Windows users, make a system repair disk.
I spent the morning recovering from a Windows Non-Start…not the Blue Screen of Death (thankfully) but the Blue Screen of Heavenly Light that Windows goes to when one of its critical start-up files has been corrupted.
Corrupted how? Not a virus, not malware, not a hacker…my anti-virus/firewall software is strong and current. So who knows? Random cosmic rays? Dust particles? Static discharge from the cat rubbing up against the tower? Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter.
I’d become complacent in my backup routine, and hadn’t done a full backup for a while. Had it been bad, I might have lost tax information, and all my Kindle e-book work-in-progress. Not tragic, but a serious patootie-pain.
So, no post for today, other than this caution: Practice Defensive Computing! Back up your work!
Best,
k
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
I lost 40k pages of a really good book about 5 years ago. I think it was the best things I’ve ever written, and it took until this year before I could bring myself to start trying to recreate it.
Now all of my writing is stored in the magical internet cloud, so I don’t have to worry about that. If the cloud dies, it’s on the computer, and if the computer dies, it’s in the cloud. And every time I work on it, it saves in both spots. I love it.
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I hope you meant 40k words, not pages! Though losing 40k words is bad, too. Oy! I lost 30k words of my very first novel attempt, but trust me, losing those words was a kindness to the world of literature,
I’m still loath to trust the cloud, for security or reliability.
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Yes, I did mean words. Thanks for catching that!
I don’t totally trust the cloud. I use flash drives, too, but I tend to lose those.
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