Backup Your Computer by Mandy Rosko

This week we’re going to talk about the importance of backing up your work.

 

As in all of your work.

 

Your cover arts, your edits, your books, even those extra couple hundred, or even couple of thousand, words that you’ve written and have yet to back up.

 

Because my computer crashed a couple of days ago, and I had to reset the entire hard drive.

 

Which meant erasing everything and reinstalling Sierra, (an old operating system) and starting over.

 

It was beyond strange to see my computer with no files saves to the desktop. I’ve been meaning to clean it all out, to uncluttered those files, but to have everything gone like that actually messed with my mind for a little while.

 

I’d saved everything to my desktop and went to restart the computer so it would have a fresh start before my livestream, but then it kept powering off on its own while still loading.

 

Not a good sign, and it took me several hours before I found out what was wrong, and another hour of denial before I set to work fixing the problem.

 

I’m still not entirely sure how fixed it is. I’m a bit terrified to restart the computer and see if it will work, but I’ve got some of my old stuff downloaded back onto the computer, OBS, Steam, Scrivener and Vellum, though now I have to hunt down their license keys to make them work again.

 

All in all, most everything I had was backed up to my dropbox with the exception of some cover arts, which should be still available as downloads via attachment in my email, some edits I was working on, and 3K words of my latest novel.

 

It still hurt to lose all that, and I’m not looking forward to finding all my old cover arts, though I think they were also backed up to Dropbox.

 

my Dropbox also happens to be a cluttered mess, you see.

 

That being said, thank God for Dropbox, and this is a warning and reminder for you so you don’t go through what I did. If you notice it’s been a while since your last save, make sure to get that fixed right now. Backup your computer to Dropbox, then get an external hard rive and backup your dropbox to it. It will save you a huge headache.

 

And make it so you don’t have to rewrite thousands of words on an already tight deadline