On my Todoist list this week it says ‘apply cpr to website’. It’s my fault it is not alive. I know that. My last post was like March 2019. *makes a face*

But that reminder came up today – thanks, past self – and I am determined to post something. Even if it is a ramble about how unreliable I am.

It’s always hard to get things going again; so much easier to keep them going once they are rolling along. Insert flywheel analogy or stone, moss… you know the rest.

In 2019 I had a tech disaster. My hard drive died, and in a series of miscalculations including reliance on tech friends, rather than professionals… no, that’s not quite right. He IS a pro, he’s just the friend of one of my kids and I did not make it very high up his priority list. I understand that. He put his business first–like I should have, eh?

It took weeks to even get him to check it out.

And in the weeks that stretched into months while I was waiting for everything to be repaired, I kind of let things slide, getting more and more stressed all the time, which is not conducive to being creative.

And given the tech pro did not want to impart bad news to me, I thought the disk was recoverable. Miscommunications all round.

It was not recoverable.

By the time *I* worked that out, [can you imagine how stressed I was by this time?] I just gave up on the pro and purchased a new solid state hard drive large enough to handle those enormous Scrivener files. [Scrivener I love you but jeez those files can be huge.] Kid extra installed it for me. [We went solid state because Australia is only going to be getting hotter and heat isn’t good for tech.]

And I happily went to plug in my external hard drive to copy all my data across… and nope.

My external hard drive was dead; unrecoverably dead, wouldn’t even turn on kind of dead. What are the odds? I mean, I know I have an issue with tech, but … really? [Seagate, I do NOT like you.]

Sighs heavily.

I had made a backup onto one of the kids’ external hard drive, so I didn’t lose everything. If I had lost the last 25 years of digital photos, I may have burnt something down.

I’ve just lost the last two years. Finance records, databases of dvds, music and books, words written, books purchased, email addresses, contact details for friends, permission from people to use their images for book covers, etc. All gone.

I sobbed.

So far as my writing goes, sure, there are docs in Google, scrivener backups to zip files, and docs in Evernote and more stuff here there and everywhere. The cloud is pretty good when something like this happens.

Half the issue is the sheer amount of hours it takes to work out what is even missing. I am seriously going to have to go through my Goodreads list to work out what books I have lost. I get a lot of copies through ARC teams, or promotions, or direct from authors. I am trying to message people in Kickstarter to get new download links to things I purchased.

It takes longer to start fixing it all when my inner critical voice is telling me what an idiot I am.

So here I am.

I am an idiot. That’s done; we’ve got that out of the way.

I can hear J Thorn saying ‘if your backups are not in THREE different places, your data does not exist.’ I read Joanna Penn’s daily back up regime and thought ‘that’s a bit over the top’. She lists it in her latest title: Productivity for Authors. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48561019-productivity-for-authors]

I write in Scrivener but every single day I write, I compile a MSWord document of my work in progress (WIP). I save it with a date and time stamp and keep all the iterations, so I end up with a Draft folder with 50+ documents in.

This is called version control. If you haven’t worked in the corporate or tech world, you might not know about version control, but basically, even if I lose one of these versions, I’ve got so many others over time that I will never lose everything. I don’t go back and look at those older drafts but if something happens, I won’t lose the whole project. I also email the file to myself every day on Gmail so I always have another backup and I save the Draft to a Dropbox folder in the cloud which syncs between workstations. Even if my MacBook Pro gets stolen or blows up, everything is in Dropbox.

I do this for every writing session, whether it’s first draft or editing. Every time I touch the manuscript, I compile it, save it to Dropbox, and email it to myself. Sometimes that is two or three times a day during my intensive writing phases.

I also keep backups on physical external hard drives and save some important files to Amazon S3 cloud hosting, so I back up pretty much everything multiple times to build in redundancy. I worked in the tech industry for 13 years, so I know these things are necessary and saving too much is better than losing it all.

 

from: Penn, Joanna. Productivity For Authors: Find Time to Write, Organize your Author Life, and Decide what Really Matters (Books for Writers Book 10) (pp. 69-70). Curl Up Press. Kindle Edition.

No, no, it isn’t over the top. It seems like there might be less sobbing with this method.

I’m off to buy the largest USB stick I can afford, and maybe a new external hard drive.