I’d like to say that it cratered, or that it broke, or that a virus killed it…but nope. I lost it. Gone, baby gone. All is not lost (err, whatever). I have backups on top of backups. But I did lose my digital rights management for songs I bought from Puretracks — and I lost approximately 500 words of a short story called Cold Dark (and the way writing goes, those are completely irreplaceable words — that will always seem like pure gold as I try to rewrite them).
It’s time to move to the cloud my friend. I write pretty much everything on Google Docs these days, I use Google Calc for all my Excel. Since I’ve always got internets, I don’t need offline copies, but if I really need one, then I save it locally and use it offline.
The cloud is your friend.
You lost it? Lost it?!? Explain, please. This is not normally something I take out of my computer (unless it craters) so what were you doing with yours?
And Brian, explain more about the cloud please. (Ooh, this is all starting to sound really Rollerball to me. And I’m talking original, here.)
Eileen
Cloud computing — the problem I have is access to the internet. I don’t ALWAYS have access. And sometimes, when I’m working and don’t want to be distracted I, gasp, turn OFF my wireless. I know, strange.
I’ve taken a look at Google Docs and it just doesn’t seem to be that great. When it’s the equivalent (and it will be one done) then I’ll be onboard.
Eileen — my hard drive was 3 inches by 5 inches in a silver case. Very small and fits in a pocket. It had all my documents on it. As in ALL. Luckily, I had plenty of backups, but I hadn’t backed up in about a month. Didn’t lose too much.
Ahh. I get it. What fits in a pocket can easily fall out of a pocket. Son of a B — that would be tough, but better than the way I lost my hard drive. (Which was having it commit suicide, right in my machine.)
Eileen — your hard drive cratering SAVED me. Because I immediately went ‘hmmm, I should backup’. Thus, I hardly lost anything. And because I combed my four computers for temp files, I FOUND what I thought I had lost. So no real loss.
We have everything in the house backing up to the WiFi drive, thankfully, so when I did something smart like spilling a beer on my laptop, frying the drive, motherboard and just about everything else in it, I wasn’t S.O.L. And once the computer went in for the Frankenstien overhaul, and came back it was a matter of just rebuilding from the back up. Two hours and I realized the value of a backup plan.
The funny thing is, now I am told I should have a backup for my backup in case it ever fails too. Following that logic I’d have a strong of hard drives circling the globe.
P.S. site works fine now. No malware errors.
John — I DO have backups of backups (I have 4 total). But I’m looking for a solution that will keep them all in sync.
You know, I just spilled a pop on my laptop. Luckily, no adverse effects!
Glad I could help out. Sigh.
I have multiple points of backup goodness thanks to Windows Home Server.
1: All of my computers are backed up nightly. I had a problem with my Laptop once (I installed something dumb on it), dropped my recovery CD in the drive tray, and 20 minutes later I was restored to the version of my system from 3 nights ago.
2: I the Hard Drives in my Home Server are a RAID array, meaning if one breaks, the other one still has all of the data.
3: I do incremental backups of stuff like my docs and photos to an external drive that I keep at work. In case of something catastrophic.
4: I use Jungle Disk for some essential stuff, it backs stuff up to Amazon’s S3 service, and my Home Server just sees it as another networked drive. This one costs a little bit of money (.15 / GB / Month), but it’s kind of worth it.
Hopefully I’ll never lose anything ever again!