Imagine losing all that hard work
This is an introduction to a short series of blog posts on the importance of backing up your data - I’ll update it with links to each part as they go live.
- Introduction - this article
- The 3-2-1 Rule (or 50 ways to lose your data)
- Local Hero
- Spread it about
- Offsite Backup
- Summary
There’s a saying among technology experts:
There are two kinds of people: those who backup, and those who have never lost all their data.
If you don’t back up what you write, you will lose it some day. Hard disks die, even modern SSDs. People erase things by accident, laptops are stolen, houses flood - there are as many ways to lose your data as you can imagine, and then some more.
But you can prevent it.
Backup is not all that complicated (although you can dive down the rabbit hole as far as you want), and I have some simple advice to follow to ensure you don’t wake up one morning to find everything you did during NaNoWriMo has vanished into the ether.
Over the next few days you’ll get some nice simple techniques to ensure you never have that awful feeling when you open up Scrivener and realise there’s nothing there.
For now, dig out that old USB stick you have in a drawer somewhere and plug it in - see whether there’s anything you need on there, and get ready to protect your data!
If you don’t have a USB stick, here’s one on special offer for ‘Cyber Monday’ - a Sandisk 64GB USB3.0 which will work on anything with a USB socket .
Stay tuned!
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash