Writerland » backing up

Back up!

Meghan Ward — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:04:50 +0000

A quick reminder for all my followers to enter the Writerland contest to win a PERSONALIZED autographed copy of The Secret Miracle: A Novelist’s Handbook. The deadline is Thursday, April 15, at midnight.

Another reminder to back up your files. I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s important for writers to be reminded periodically of the importance of backing up your data. There are many ways to do it: an external hard drive, an online backup system like DropBox, even e-mailing your book to your Gmail account. If you don’t, and you lose all your data, it can cost you $1500+ to have a place like Drive Savers recover it, and there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to recover anything at all. If you have a Mac, Time Machine is excellent, but make sure you run it every week. My external hard drive is in my basement office, so sometimes I go a month or longer without running Time Machine. The best is to have a service that automatically backs up for you every time you’re online. For my book and most recent documents, including all of my editing projects, I use DropBox. You get 2GB for free, but if you want to back up ALL your data, there are cheaper options than DropBox. Mozy, SpiderOak and LiveDrive are but a few. I’ve been meaning to sign up for a SpiderOak account for some time, and I need to get on that before the big one hits and destroys both my laptop and external hard drive (for those not living in CA, “the big one” is the overdue earthquake whose fault I live on.) Whatever you do, do it NOW. Your computer won’t warn you before it loses all your data. One day it’ll be working fine and the next: POOF! And even if you lose just 10-20% of your files, it’s no fun.

So now here’s a question for you. How do you back up your files? Have you ever lost data due to a computer crash? Do tell!

Link Love

Meghan Ward — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:25:52 +0000

Wow. This week I’m actually going to post my favorite links on Friday like all the cool people do!

Editor Alan Rinzler over at The Book Deal has a detailed post on memoir with seven tips for combating your inner critic.

Jacquelyn Wheeler breaks down the pros and cons of self-publishing vs traditional publishing.

Shelli at Market My Words wrote a fabulous post back in early December about finding moments of peace amid a very busy life.

A great reminder to BACK UP from Daphne over at KT Literary. I wrote about this myself a while back.

Roni over at Fiction Groupie gives all the nitty gritty details on how to structure an online critique group.

Sierra Godfrey outlines different kinds of tropes on her Word Up Wednesday.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review will continue publication. Yay!

More fodder for the Apple Tablet Rumor Mill: Apple Insider reports that all the 10.1-inch screens in Asia have been bought up. It also reports rumors that the device will have a Magic Mouse-like pad and that it will come in an aluminum enclosure, but the jury is still out on whether the tablet will have a camera. According to Mashable, the tablet WILL BE all that it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it may revolutionize these seven industries. There is still debate about what the tablet will be called: iSlate, iGuide and iPad are some of the rumors, with iSlate in the lead. The announcement is still rumored to be scheduled for Jan. 26 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. I can’t wait!

Have a great weekend, everybody, and notice that I’ve added Google Friend Connect to the sidebar, so sign up if you don’t already have an account and join this site! There will be prizes involved. For real.

Back up!

Meghan Ward — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:52:53 +0000

Every couple of months, I get an e-mail from a friend who lost a bunch of files because he/she hadn’t been backing up regularly. I started backing up after the Sex in the City episode in which Carrie gets the sad Mac face and loses all her files. On the show, she bought a Zip Drive. My sister-in-law was working at Iomega at the time and said sales skyrocketed after that episode. I bought one, too, but didn’t back up often enough. My computer did die eventually (as all computers do), and I had to pay to recover the data. Fortunately, it only cost me a couple hundred dollars.

Since then, my husband bought me this massive external hard drive that I had wanted for a while, and I started using Time Machine with that. But then I got it in my head that Time Machine was slowing my computer down (which it apparently wasn’t), so I shut it off. I had this other application running on my computer, File Vault, which I thought spend up my computer (which it apparently didn’t). It turned out that the use of File Vault made it impossible to recover any of the data on my drive. Well, I shouldn’t say impossible. I never took it to Drive Savers, who can recover ALMOST anything, but they’re very expensive ($1500+ from what I’ve heard, and one friend of mine took is laptop there, and they couldn’t recover anything). I took a look at my external hard drive and—doh!—I hadn’t backed up some data (like my Quicken files) for three years! Fortunately, I’d been manually backing up most of it, and I’d been e-mailing the book I was working on to my Gmail account at the end of every day. Because I had 90% of my data, I didn’t bother to try to recover the rest.

But I did start using DropBox after that. You can backup up to 2GB for free, and it’s extremely easy to use. You can access your files from any computer, and if you want to store more than 2GB, you can pay an annual fee. However, if you plan to pay the annual fee, there are other services and some of them are a lot cheaper: Mozy, SpiderOak and LiveDrive are but a few. I haven’t done it yet, but because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and am paranoid that The Big One is going to knock my house down one of these days, along with much of the rest of the Bay Area, I want all my files backed up onto a service that is not only outside of my home, but outside of California as well. I use SmugMug to store all my photos, but I’ll probably sign up for Spider Oak soon.

All this to say, BACK UP. Take a few minutes to open a DropBox account, e-mail your most important docs (or upload them if they’re not huge) to your G-mail account, run Time Machine, do whatever you need to do, but do it TODAY because there is no warning before the sad Mac attacks your computer and everything is lost.