Myself, I really do prefer comedies.

This post is the seemingly-inevitable warning, from one writer to anyone else who stores their creativity in digital format, to back yo’ shit up.

Until this summer, my only flashdrive was one that I’d gotten with my first computer in 2000. It was a whopping 32 MB, and I used it sparingly at best. When I started moving around between Colorado and Nevada, between laptop and desktop and this-other-top computers, I decided I really needed something a little heftier. I picked up a 4 GB flashdrive and named it Switchblade for how it folded. I loaded it with all my writing – novels, WIPs, short stories, brainstormed ideas – and plenty of other day-to-day stuff, including the home study supplementary videos for my martial arts practice. It was awesome.

It was so awesome, in fact, that I deleted most of the documents – including all the writing – from my desktop harddrive.

I can hear the round of facepalms from here. You know where this is going, right? But there’s a twist at the end.

I was converting two new computers from Vista to XP Pro in the office and using my external harddrive and Switchblade to assist in the data transfer between old and new machines. I left Switchblade plugged in while clearing and recreating partitions for the fresh OS install. Somehow, I nuked its partition, too – and now it can’t even be reformatted and used again. The entire flashdrive is dead, dead, dead.

Last night, I discovered/remembered my folly in deleting the “Writing” folder from my computer. I had a moment of white-noise shock, then denial, then a hot shower, then resignation. (A hot shower is an integral step in the cycle of acceptance, after all.) I sat down before my dinky little monitor and began taking stock.

Well, I had almost all of my recent-and-decent stuff from the last five years archived on my various past livejournals. I had even converted it all to .php pages in preparation for putting it on my personal site. Okay, not too bad.

I looked further. The few longer, not-formatted-for-web works-in-progress (like my past NaNovels) had been uploaded to my server, since I’d been making efforts to HTMLize them to add them to the aforementioned site. Okay, good there, too.

Into Fang Wood, which was the primary cause for my primordial oh-god-no terror, was saved in my email. I had all sixty-plus thousand words of the story itself, although I’d lost almost all of the intensive brainstorming and plot-building that I’d done over the summer. But that was okay, too, because it’s still fresh enough in my head to be rewritten with minimal flubs and gaps.

Despite the situation trying its best to be a tragedy, I had probably only lost 10% of my work – mostly the stuff I had deemed unworthy of being reworked and/or shown to others. The good stuff I did lose can be replicated fairly easily. It was a minor accident instead of a cause for kicking myself repeatedly in the tailbone.

I got lucky. I am, however, going to take this as a very firm warning and be more zealous about protecting and backing up my work.

Take this story as your own warning, too. Don’t risk losing years of work just because you don’t want to bother taking five minutes a week to save your files to a different computer, email them to yourself, upload them to your website, or keep them on a disk.

(Maybe someday I’ll figure out this curious little feeling of liberation and relief that came even before I realized I had the bulk of my good work safely ferreted away in online nooks and crannies.)

Related posts:

1. A Triumphant Return!
2. Plugging In & Out
3. It’s been a little crazy ’round here.

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