I
Must Be In Hell-- My Hard Drive Crashed!
By Lyne Royce
Can I predict your future? Yes I can. With limits, but I can. No, I did not hire a detective to find out what you’re not doing at your job. No, I did not hire spies to bug your house.
What I did do was work in the technology business for 20 years. And there is one thing I know about your future with absolute certainty. Your hard drive is going to crash. Here’s what you’re thinking, right?
- Maybe it won’t crash if I take good care of it.
- Maybe I bought the best brand so mine won’t crash.
- Maybe God won’t punish me and my hard drive is blessed.
The question is not if it’s going to crash but when.
Hard drives are built to fail, just like any other mechanical device. All you have to do is remember how many toasters you’ve bought in the last few years. And those were just toasters! Believe it, it’ll happen sooner or later, but it’ll happen. Your only choice to avoid the hell that is recreating some of your lost data is back up.
Now for the whining. I’ve heard it all.
- I don’t have time to back up.
- I don’t have the money to back up.
- I don’t do enough work to back up.
Right. And you don’t need a computer, either, right? If you put something into the computer’s hard drive, you need to keep it. It’s that simple.
I remember the first time my hard drive crashed. All right, you can wipe the smirk off your face. It didn’t happen to me twice. That’s the point:
Learn from a mistake and you don’t have to visit Hell yourself because I just described the movie I made personally with my visit. Now I’m back. Hopefully. (I’m told that stuff I did when I was a kid doesn’t count against you. God, I hope not, or I’m a garnish for the devil’s buffet.)
I use two methods to back up: a portable hard drive and a CD burner. I also use a floppy disk for the accounting system, but that’s still a backup of a backup so I’m safe there twice. Oh, and I rotate between odd and even day backups. Laugh if you want, but you won’t laugh the first time you lose your work.
How, you’re asking, do I afford a portable hard drive or a CD burner to back up my 40-gig hard drive? Those things are astronomically expensive. Well, that’s relative. Here’s why:
Let’s say you’re working on a book manuscript and you’re up to Chapter 18. Your publisher’s last address was Heaven and you’re being paid expenses which you’ve kept track of diligently.
Next event: Your hard drive crashes. Have you done your backup? Oh, you have - last month – after Chapter 7 was written. Well done. NOT. There goes that Pulitzer.
If you printed out all 18 chapters and are fortunate enough to have text recognition software and a scanner equipped with an automatic document feeder, it’ll only take you a little bit of time to recover your book. Except for the relatively minimal amount of time you’ll have to spend inputting the other eleven chapters and then having the software recognize the text, you don’t have to worry. Wow, you’re covered. This job should only take 17 hours and the expense of the OCR program you probably don’t have.
Wouldn’t that expense and lost time have been better spent finishing the other 17 chapters if you’d only put into place a backup routine? The money you save may be your own. Because it is your own. When your editor calls and wants the first draft and you tell her you lost half of it because your hard drive crashed, I guarantee she won’t be sympathetic. She has responsibilities, too, and high up on the list is making money for her publishing company from writers who are careful about not losing their work. Telling your 4th grade teacher the dog ate your homework isn’t going to cut it with your editor. She will not be amused.
Yes, there is a cheaper way to back up: on the Internet. I’m not a big fan of this method but this is a possibility for back up on the cheap. And, no Virginia, it’s usually not free. If you find a free one, remember:
You get what you pay for. I’m very skeptical of Internet backup offers. Can you spell ‘paranoia'? Three 12-year-old kids hacked into the Israeli Defense System last year. I imagine all three are hanging by their toes and still spilling lemonade in their eyes in some jail cell in the desert near Jerusalem. Not even to mention the kids who invaded the U.S.
D.O.D. two years ago. However, if you’re game, here are a few that some of my friends have used:
http://www.areno_com/
http://www.ibackup.com/
All right, enough with the harangue. Here are the best ways to protect yourself other than Internet backups or the slow, icky, label-attaching, I-bought-the-wrong-formatted-disks floppy disk method. I’m assuming that by now you already take your writing career seriously so you already know you have to invest a certain amount of moola to keep it going. Even if you wash cars for a living, you have to find a way to pay money to avoid losing your work.
The best, and naturally most expensive way, is a USB portable hard drive. These are sexy little pieces of gear about four inches by six inches and a half inch thick that plug directly into the USB port and are ready to go. Assuming you have upgraded your Windows version beyond 95, plugging in the drive is all you have to do for the system to recognize the hardware. After that, you’re ready to rock and roll. In fact, you can just drag-and-drop your files by opening two instances of Explorer (no, not Internet Explorer,
Mook, your system Explorer!) Resize both Explorers so one fits across the top but only covers the top half of the screen and the other Explorer fits across the bottom.
Tip: If this is the method you use to copy files on your own system, from one folder to another, it’s a good idea to ALWAYS use the same Explorer window as your target and always use the same Explorer window as your source. For example, ALWAYS use the top window as your target and the bottom one as your source. Always use this copy method layout when you move or copy files and you will save yourself confusion and 37 pounds of Excedrin later, I promise. I can say this because I’ve experienced this problem also, so no snorting at me. At least I’m big enough to admit I made a really dumb move.
Here are some great places to buy your portable hard drive:
http://www.xpcgear.com/portdrives.html
http://www.iomega.com (My personal favorite.) *
* By the way, Iomega comes with an auto back up program that allows 5 revisions of the same document. Pretty cool.
As for the CD back up method, Staples.com, OfficeMax.com, OfficeDepot.com and possibly your Aunt Lillian all sell blank
CDRs to write to and they all can be purchased on the web if you have a CD burner. It works the same way as copying to a floppy disk; a CD just holds more information than a disk and copying to a CD is a lot faster. For all I know, you may be required to make a personal visit to Aunt Lillian to acquire her CD brand and probably have to put up with second-hand smoke from Uncle Harry’s cigars. Sorry about the digression. I annoyed you with that cigar comment? What, you’d rather read the New York Times? At least here, you’re not bored out of your socks. Sort of.
Think of me the next time you take the opportunity to back up your hard drive. Try to be nice. Death threats don’t receive a response or gifts.
Lyne Royce is a freelance writer living near Phoenix with one devoted husband
and 6 spoiled cats. All are strays, including the devoted husband. Lyne likes
stray cats, the Arizona desert and 80’s rock. After fifteen years teaching
software classes, Lyne decided to listen to Thalia, her muse, who had been
beating Lyne over the head with a baseball bat to get her attention. Lyne
currently belongs to several writers discussion groups and is a member of The
Net Wits, National Association of Women Writers and Southwest Writers
organizations. Lyne is also a contributing columnist at www.ewritersplace.com
& www.absolutewrite.com.
Contact
Lyne at lyne@sugarworksite.com.
