And sometimes, it seems, especially so when they are my plans.
The story begins… Tuesday. Last Tuesday.
See, I decided to splurge on a tablet with my Christmas cash. It arrived last Tuesday.
I got an HP Stream 8, and it runs Windows 8, and is technically a miniature computer. With Microsoft Office and everything.
I wanted something with a touchscreen that I could, er, play a few games on (Mahjong… Wordament… Snap Attack… my Xbox username is teaandyarn if anyone really wants to know…), something that I could haul around easily and have all my writing there at the tip of my fingers all the time (hence why I decided on a Windows 8 tablet vs. an Android or iPad thing), and so I wouldn’t have to keep printing grocery lists each week, but could instead sync them between two devices, etc. Though I’m not taking my tablet to the grocery store until I have a case for it. ~shakes fist at Amazon for not shipping the case yet even though it’s supposed to be delivered tomorrow~
(I am really sorry for that insane, rambling sentence above.)
So I get my tablet set up and running, but I’m still using my laptop for all the important computer things. Like, last week… not writing.
On Sunday afternoon, I went over to a friend’s house for a bit, and put my computer to sleep. When I came home, I tried to wake it up, and it did wake up… but very sluggishly. Like, 10 minutes+ sluggish.
So I force it to restart.
And my laptop never booted up again.
For those of you on Facebook, Twitter, and tsū, you’ve seen my ensuing drama pretty much as it happened.
Hubby has a tech friend from his previous job, and he came over last night to look at my computer.
The hard drive is dead.
Very, very, very fortunately, my files are not.
Because if I had lost those… I would have lost everything I’ve worked on for 10+ years. Catalyst. Blood of Trees. The Gyti-will-it-ever-really-get-completely-written-massive-chronicles. Short stories. Everything. But they were able to stick my bad hard drive into hubby’s newly built computer (I had a bigger hard drive than he does on my dinky little laptop, bwahahaha. He’s only got, like 250Gb. I had 750. Hehehee.), and pull all of my files onto his storage drive.
Cause you see… my tablet came with one free year of Office 365, which includes one TB of One Drive storage. It was literally on my to-do list within the first couple of days of this week to back up everything on my laptop. I just haven’t had the space – or the money to buy a back-up storage via cloud or physical storage – until now.
Fortunately, as we speak, my files are being copied from the storage drive into One Drive. I’m not sure how many hours this is going to take, though, considering it’s been nearly one and it’s still on my blog folder. Whee.
So what’s the moral of the story here?
Back up. Somehow, some way, so that even if you’re really, really luck like I was, and you didn’t lose everything, you don’t have to wait hours to keep working on things.
What’s sad? It’s going to cost me more to replace the operating system than it is to replace the hard drive.
The title of this post is actually an (adapted) quote from the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns, which you can read here.
Rebecca Enzor
January 13, 2015 - 1:44 pm ·I always email myself the things I’ve worked on at the end of the day (usually at the end of the writing session too, if I’m writing at lunch or break), that way even if my computer dies and I lose my flash drive I still have the email backup. I’ve lost two books and countless short stories to computer failures, so I’m a bit paranoid now 😛
TraceyLynnTobin
January 13, 2015 - 4:07 pm ·If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s definitely to back things up. I happen to have a laptop with a dual hard drive, so everything I deem important gets copied to both, and then the really important stuff gets copied again to something external, like a flash drive. It might seem like overkill, but I will never lose multiple chapters of a manuscript again, dammit!
Robin S.
January 13, 2015 - 4:10 pm ·I try to keep everything in the cloud for just this reason. Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google-It’s all somewhere online.
Rebekah Loper
January 14, 2015 - 9:53 pm ·I need to at least back my writing up to Google Drive, but I’ve not been impressed with their lack of organization for files, so I rarely use it.
jazzfeathers
January 14, 2015 - 3:05 pm ·I’m terrified of losing something on my pc or my laptop, so I try to back up as much as I can… though it seems to be never enough. I have lost things, mostly mails, not my story, thanks goodness. Besides, I save my stories everywhere… I mean, in more than one place. Just in case.
You’re never safe enough, but we can certainly try our best to be 😉
Rebekah Loper
January 14, 2015 - 9:54 pm ·I almost feel like I should print everything off every time I make changes, too, lol. But that might be bordering on paranoia.
jazzfeathers
January 15, 2015 - 1:22 am ·Well, because I do all my revising on hard copies, I do keep everything printed until I save everything in multiple places 🙂
S.B. Roberts
January 14, 2015 - 3:48 pm ·Oh, Robert Burns. He’s one of my favorites. 🙂 I’m so glad to hear everything was backed up! That makes all the difference. 🙂 I use OneDrive too, and we have another layer of protection with another back-up service. (It literally backs up everything on the computer in certain intervals and they can send us a disk if anything is ever completely decimated.)
Rebekah Loper
January 14, 2015 - 9:55 pm ·I currently have two copies of everything, and it is a relief! I’ll work on third and fourth copies soon, lol. We want to invest in a 1-2 TB external drive this year, too, that hubs and I can share so that we have that extra one more layer, you know?
S.B. Roberts
January 19, 2015 - 3:18 pm ·Definitely! The more layers, the better!
heylookawriterfellow
January 16, 2015 - 2:29 pm ·Amen to that.
And, on a not-really-related note, I am disappointed this post had nothing to do with cute little mice.
Rebekah Loper
January 16, 2015 - 2:31 pm ·Have I told you about the voles that live behind my chicken coop? They’re adorable. And they don’t eat the chicken feed. So they can stay.
heylookawriterfellow
January 16, 2015 - 2:36 pm ·You are correct. Voles ARE adorable.