Oops

So my computer sits on the floor, right. The screen and keyboard go up on the desktop. Well, I'm not much of a silent sitter, never have been. I was sitting there, typing away and had one leg crossed over the other (I know, totally bad posture for how you're supposed to sit when typing--Correct sitting posture HERE by the way) and as I was slouching my vertebrae big time, swinging my free leg back and forth, WHACK!

My shin bumped into the flash drive sticking out the front of the computer. Bent it over to the side like I was trying to break a key off in a lock.

Heart lodging in my throat, I could only gape at the bent flash drive in shock. After I yanked it free of the computer and tried to straighten it...nothing. I can't pull up a single file I had saved, can't even get the computer to acknowledge there's a flash drive in there.

Now ask me what was on that flash drive.

EVERYTHING! Everything to do with my writing, anyway.

All my works-in-progress stories, all my signed contracts for stories I've sold, all the PDFs of the stories I've sold, all my little graphs, telling me how much I'd made on royalties, all my writing business expenditures, all the graphs I'd made for the promotional projects I set up. Everything. Stored in a little bitty two-inch piece of plastic and metal.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering...didn't you back anything up, Linda Kay? Well, sure. About every year or so, I copy all my files from one flash drive to another and start using the new flash, while storing the old one away. Except I hadn't done that for 2012 quite yet. So I'm saved up to 2010...except my first book didn't release until 2010, so all my book PDFs are probably gone. I have a few saved in old emails but probably not all of them.

In the WIP department, I'm a little more lucky. I just sent an email of all my currents WIPs to myself in attachments last Friday, so I'm at least within a week current of those. Not too much damage there.

Book contracts: I'm hoping I have all of those either printed out in my paper files or still have copies in old emails I've saved. Don't know everything quite yet.


I'm still not too sure how much stuff I've actually lost. Maybe nothing important. It's hard to tell until a month or so down the road when I'll be all like, I need such and such--oops. Guess that's gone forever.

I used to save everything on the hard drive of my computer. But the hard drive would always crash or I'd get a virus and lose everything (am I the only one sensing a pattern here?). So I started to rely more and more heavily on flash drives and CDs and, yeah, those old 3-by-5 inch floppy disks (but my computer doesn't even have a slot for those anymore). I still think I'll save most everything on my "next" flash drive, but....

My piece of advice for this fine hump days remains: BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP...and do it more often than you think you should!

Have a Happy Wednesday.