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 able to be
saved .
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 kid’s 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.
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.
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.
