Today's Topic: Saving Your Work on Disc/Stick
For those of you who've been following my exploits on Facebook, you already know that my laptop suffered a 'slight' difficulty. When I say slight, I mean a virus got in there and trashed most of the internet functions. Right now all it's good for is a Word Processor that also plays videos on CD/DVD's. This is why I haven't been blogging much lately. I'm using a library computer at my college to post this. I hope to have a new laptop by the end of the month, so please bear with me.
You can imagine my horror when I realized what had happened and raced to warn others on Facebook not to accept anything from me until I notified them otherwise. This was a virus that recreates itself by accessing everyone in your address book from e-mail, Facebook, etc. and mails itself to all of them. As far as I know only a couple of people fell for it because they didn't read my warnings and it got past their Virus Protection programs.
That's the long and short of things. Which brings me to backing up and saving your novel/poem/short stories whatever onto disc or memory sticks. I GOT LUCKY! The novels were untouched and were still completely intact. I'm going to be careful though and do a test by making a copy on a disc and have a friend scan and open it with their virus protection first. It wouldn't do to have my novel disc infecting someone like an agent or publisher who wanted to see the full thing. I can just picture how well that would go over. "Ah Mr. Krummenacker interesting novel you sent I was really impressed at how IT CRASHED MY ENTIRE #*&#%*+@^ SYSTEM, YOU STUPID....(insert obscene words and insults of your choice here)." I suspect the conversation would just go downhill from there.
My point being that even if I hadn't gotten lucky I would've only lost nothing. I had already saved the latest revision onto a disc. Plus, all the outlines and beginnings of other novels are also on that disc. But if I hadn't done all of this, I would've been totally screwed.
Now, I know a lot of you have children, nephews, nieces, dimwitted brothers/sisters, or the less-than-observant significant others who use your computer at one time or another. I say this to you...
****Warning it will be in all caps because I'm really trying to save you from a lot of grief.****
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SAKE OF YOUR OWN SANITY, SAVE YOUR WRITINGS ON A BLANK CD OR SEVERAL, OR A MEMORY STICK!
You'll thank me for this one day. Trust me.
That's all for now. I have to get to class. So until I can get an empty computer here at the library, or get myself a new laptop, take care. And keep writing.
You can imagine my horror when I realized what had happened and raced to warn others on Facebook not to accept anything from me until I notified them otherwise. This was a virus that recreates itself by accessing everyone in your address book from e-mail, Facebook, etc. and mails itself to all of them. As far as I know only a couple of people fell for it because they didn't read my warnings and it got past their Virus Protection programs.
That's the long and short of things. Which brings me to backing up and saving your novel/poem/short stories whatever onto disc or memory sticks. I GOT LUCKY! The novels were untouched and were still completely intact. I'm going to be careful though and do a test by making a copy on a disc and have a friend scan and open it with their virus protection first. It wouldn't do to have my novel disc infecting someone like an agent or publisher who wanted to see the full thing. I can just picture how well that would go over. "Ah Mr. Krummenacker interesting novel you sent I was really impressed at how IT CRASHED MY ENTIRE #*&#%*+@^ SYSTEM, YOU STUPID....(insert obscene words and insults of your choice here)." I suspect the conversation would just go downhill from there.
My point being that even if I hadn't gotten lucky I would've only lost nothing. I had already saved the latest revision onto a disc. Plus, all the outlines and beginnings of other novels are also on that disc. But if I hadn't done all of this, I would've been totally screwed.
Now, I know a lot of you have children, nephews, nieces, dimwitted brothers/sisters, or the less-than-observant significant others who use your computer at one time or another. I say this to you...
****Warning it will be in all caps because I'm really trying to save you from a lot of grief.****
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SAKE OF YOUR OWN SANITY, SAVE YOUR WRITINGS ON A BLANK CD OR SEVERAL, OR A MEMORY STICK!
You'll thank me for this one day. Trust me.
That's all for now. I have to get to class. So until I can get an empty computer here at the library, or get myself a new laptop, take care. And keep writing.
HAHA, Very true...I also send each chapter that I write to a certain yahoo email addy of mine. That way, it is not only there for quick email, but a back up as well.
ReplyDeleteHere's a tip I got from Joe Konrath. Dropbox.com. It not only backs up your stuff, but updates each computer that you have Dropbox on.
ReplyDeleteI write on my laptop and my desktop. I used to save my stuff to a memory stick and would go from computer to computer with that. But I was paranoid that my stick would erase, so I would save it on each computer as well. Talk about a pain.
With Dropbox, as soon as I save my manuscript on my laptop, it saves it on my desktop as well. So I always have my latest version waiting for me, whichever computer I get on.
And if my computer crashes, it's saved on the Dropbox server as well, so I just log back into Dropbox and it's there ready for me.
I. Love. It.
And you get plenty of space free, to save all of your WIP's.
Thank Konrath for that one.
Vicki