Back it up

There's a thread on the NaNoWriMo forums about backing up your work.  As the original poster makes a good point of, EVERY year it never fails that at least one person ends up in the forums, in tears and/or hysterics, having lost everything due to a computer crash, file damage, theft, something.  While you certainly can't prepare for every disaster, now is the perfect time to start getting into the habit of saving and backing up your files.

Having suffered data loss on three different occasions, I use a rule of three when backing up my work -- have the original document, plus three different types of back up.  Mine:

1. USB drive
2. SkyDrive online file storage
3. Hard copy

The first time I lost something to the point of hysterics, it was some sort of hard disk error or virus that caused a computer to shut down when I put in my flash drive, thus erasing almost everything on it, including the 12-page research paper I had been up until 3am finishing the night before.  The only thing that saved my sanity was the fact that I had hand-written 3/4 of the paper before typing it up.  The second time, I didn't save anything and my laptop crashed.  Hard drive had to be replaced, and I lost approximately 45,000 words of my novel.  I cried.  Honestly.  Third time was December 2009 -- I wrote a 13-page research paper and saved it to my flash drive, only to have something deep within the cosmos decide to screw with me and not save the paper properly. 

After that, I got a SkyDrive.  25 GB of free space, and it's accessible anywhere I have an internet connection.  Everything that is important enough to be saved to the (new and well-treated) USB drive goes into SkyDrive.  Even things that don't go on the USB go into SkyDrive, like my music, pictures, everything.  I will sing praises to that program all day -- I have yet to have any issues with it, and who can say no to 25 GB for free?  I've heard lots of writers talk about DropBox and how wonderful it is to have everything sync automatically, but in my experience, computers cannot be trusted and I'm not going to assume my irreplacible work is getting saved when it might not be.  Auto-syncs are wonderfully convenient, but I'd rather have the peace of mind in knowing I did it myself.

And, last but not least, I keep hard copies of my most important documents.  Every time I write a new chapter in my novel, I print it and keep it in a water-proof accordion file.  I hand-write a lot of my school work and keep a hold of those pages, too.  One can never be too careful.

Don't wait to back up your work, and do it in more than one source.  Don't make your backup habits long and convoluted, but definitely don't leave it to chance.  Your sanity is really not worth it, and your precious writing deserves to be well cared for.