Losing 3 Chapters of Double Standards
January 2003 As posted on the Simon & Schuster Bulletin Board

Melanie just posted a heartbreaking message about losing the work she'd been saving to an internet site that was supposed to store and preserve it. Everyone who uses a computer has probably lost data of some kind or another due to a computer malfunction, and I can say from hard experience that it is always hugely stressful...but NOTHING quite equals the horrific sensation of being a writer and suddenly losing your creative work.

In 1984, when computers ran on dual floppy systems, I lost three chapters of DOUBLE STANDARDS--because it was raining and we had a momentary power outage. I was absolutely paralyzed when I rebooted my machine and the chapters were gone.

Once that happens, a healthy paranoia sets in and never leaves. That happened to me nearly 20 years ago when IBM personal computers were fragile, underdeveloped, and unreliable. In the ensuing years, I've invested in sturdy, high-speed, state of the art machines that I replace every three years or less. And I am STILL just as paranoid about saving and preserving my work, so I use several simultaneous methods--religiously.

I'll mention them here, but many of you may have other practical methods to suggest, so feel free to pitch in for everyone's benefit.

First, simplest and seemingly the silliest is that every time I finish a page, I automatically send it to the printer! Those rough-draft pages then get stuck into a folder and left there--hopefully never to be needed. If I revise a page I've already printed, I send it to the printer again. I don't remove the earlier version. These pages are nothing more than an end-run around any and all electronic failures. Interestingly, they frequently serve another purpose by providing me with text I may have deleted and a month later, want to use.

My second file preservation/protection method is to have a second hard drive installed in my computers. One copy of my work is kept on "C" Drive BUT a duplicate copy is always transferred to "D" Drive (my second hard drive.) You can buy an 80 Gigabyte hard drive for about $100 and it will store more files than you'll be able to create in a lifetime.

If your computer suffers a terminal crash, it's your main hard drive (normally called "C" drive) that fails. You'd have to replace or repair your C drive, but your secondary hard drive will be just fine, with all your files in tact.

Another method I use is a backup program called Norton GHOST. It will back up an entire 80 gig hard drive in about 5 minutes and compress it into a cutle little file with a ghost icon. That backup file is automatically made and kept on my secondary hard drive, NOT C drive.

A CD Burner is another viable possibility for creating unlimited storage, and I used that too. A CD Burner enables us to create CDs with 750 megabytes of file storage on each CD. A 1000 page manuscript with a lot of other auxiliary files, takes up maybe 1 1/2 megabytes.

There's always the old floppy-disk drive, too, and I'm not sure why Mel didn't make floppy copies of the data she was storing on her internet site...probably the same reason I don't: They're a nuisance to switch in and out and my CPU is not within arm's reach of my desk.

~~ Judith McNaught on Simon & Schuster's SimonSays Discussion Board