When I was twelve or thirteen, I finished my first "novel", a bit of sci-fi fluff that I took far too seriously and spent many serious hours writing in a very serious (and large) green spiral bound notebook. It was my life's greatest accomplishment up til that point, and when I finally got it all transcribed (times new roman, 14 point font, double spaced, because I liked the look of many pages) onto the family Gateway, I congratulated myself on my writerly prowess and moved on to my next project.
A month later, that Gateway crashed. Since this was before the age of in-house tech support who would move all of your data onto an extra hard drive or a new computer, just about everything was lost. Since I was thirteen and not in possession of an email account, or really any concept of "backup" that 'everything' included my magnum opus.
Worse, since I naively assumed that the transcribed version on my parents' desktop would last forever and ever until the end of time, I had torn the pages out of the notebook to use it for something else...and lost them. In one month, nearly a year of work was gone. Poof. Into the cyber void.
I am not what you would call a fastidious saver-of-documents. I once nearly lost my entire portfolio of finished and unfinished fiction pieces when my laptop had a meltdown. Had it not been for my clever brother, who had backed everything up on his own desktop when he set my laptop up for me (perhaps unconsciously planning for my laptop's inevitable death at my hands), I would have lost every word I had written in the past 6 years. After that particular event, I bought myself an 80GB external hard drive, and obsessively backed it up every night....for about a month.
My husband is a fastidious saver-of-documents. Thumb drives litter our apartment, and I'm fairly certain he would be lost without his external hard drive, which goes with him to and from work. For the new quarter, I needed an external hard drive for one of my classes--one with more space than my 80 gigs--so I bought a 250 gig one.
Which I promptly lost.
Without ever even opening the blasted box.
Yes, it is as awful as it sounds.
However, there is one way in which I can usually be counted on to save my work. It's not the most reliable, but I've turned it into an art: email.
I send my documents to multiple email addresses so that at least A DRAFT of whatever I'm working on at the time will be floating somewhere in my inbox, relatively safe from any C-drive related disasters or my own incompetence. Today, I finally did just that for my Nano-novel and its notes.
So how do you back up or otherwise protect your novels? Do you email them to yourself? Print copies? Use a drive of some sort?
Happy Day 8, everyone. Good luck and keep writing!
~Katherine
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