I recently read about a Rutgers student, Jingming Zhang, whose laptop was stolen: on it was his only copy of his graduate thesis. He never backed up data from his computer, and suddenly he was faced with a thesis due and nothing to show for a lengthy project that he sweated blood to complete.
As a writer, I should know better, but I have also prepared scads of written material and suddenly found myself with a frozen computer and lost the data. BACK UP YOUR DATA, people. Those family photos should be stored in a cloud or some type of separate storage. Your collection of rare tunes? Copy them to a thumb drive or something. Your Great American Novel. Print it out and put it in a fireproof safe.
I went out and got a portable hard drive with one trillobyte of storage and backed up all my data. Copies are now secured where I hope it will serve me when the time is right.
I have decided to declare May 9 National Back Up Your Work Day. This Thursday, break out some rewritable CDs and your ticked-off red bird flash drive, or call up a cloud service and get it done.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 