Blogger: Rachel Kent
I’m sure many of you have seen the news of our giant California fire–the Rocky fire. Thankfully, it is about 40 miles away from my home, but I believe that 40 or more homes have been lost to the fire already.
If you were told that you had to evacuate your home, what would you grab (other than your family and pets)? I know I would want to grab my purse, computers, backup hard drive, old photo albums and our file box with important papers.
If you didn’t have time to grab anything, what would you lose? Do you have a backup copy of your manuscripts and important papers emailed to yourself or stored on a cloud device? Have you taken the time to create a backup of your photos and to store it somewhere outside the home? I have a DVD backup of pictures–not recent enough–stored at my parents’ house. I need to remotely back them up again.
What systems do you use to protect your files in case of emergency situations like this fire?
Do you need to do anything to up your protection?
I definitely need to figure out a remote storage solution for backups–I have backup disks in case my computer dies, but only outdated systems for catastrophic events like earthquakes or fires.
Shelia Stovall
Thank the Lord your home was spared. My home was destroyed by fire when I was four years old and we escaped with was our lives, and a family photo Mama snatched from the wall. It is my earliest memory. Until you posted this, I hadn’t thought to scan important documents. I use dropbox for remote digital storage of my work and photos. I also email a copy of my most recent draft to myself on the first day of the month, and I use a flash drive. It only takes seconds and I’ve invested hours. Every writer must develop the habit to backup files.
Rachel Kent
Wow! I can see how that would be engrained in your memory! So very scary.
Shirlee Abbott
Yes to the emails, yes to the cloud, yes to a flash drive.
I sometimes imagine myself in the place of our persecuted brothers and sisters in other countries. Forced to flee for my faith, what would I take? What would I carry on the run? Shelia mentions a single family photo. Which one of the hundreds would I tuck in my shirt? How I would hate to leave my electronics behind.
Lord, protect our California compatriots from the flames!
Rachel Kent
Amen!
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Yes to what Sheila and Shirlee do.
* I don’t worry about the issue. I figure that if something’s lost, there’s a good reason for it.
* Case in point – when I was in grad school, part of my work was to write a program to analyze the behaviour of reinforced concrete pilings under seismic loading. One day I went to the dentist for a filling, and ended up with all my wisdom teeth removed.
* I was in a bit of pain, but decided to work on the program anyway…and in the text editor I did something wrong, and all but the first 53 lines of a 5000 line program were lost. And there was no backup.
* Rewriting took a weekend, but it was a good thing; the program had grown by accretion, and I was losing touch with what some of the subroutines were doing. Having to rewrite it all in one ‘campaign’ brought it into focus, and made me better able to utilize the program’s capabilities.
* It was written in Fortran…anyone remember that language?
Jennifer Zarifeh Major
Duh, of course I remember. It’s what they spoke in The People’s Democratic Republic of Fortraniastan.
Rachel Kent
Losing all of your family photos would be a lot harder than losing work, I think. Even a full manuscript can be re-written and it might be better the second time. But backing up is best. 🙂
Kristen Joy Wilks
Good reminder, Rachel. I just e-mailed my latest version of the last ms. I was working on to myself, but I need to go back and make sure that I’ve e-mailed the other mss. to myself as well. I have everything backed up on a thumb drive in my purse as well. But having it on gmail would make me feel a lot better.
Rachel Kent
I love that we have a lot of storage via email now. It is so nice!
Melodie
For years I’ve had what was dubbed my tornado file. I’d be at school in late May, well after the kids were gone, making copies. The janitors teased me that I was getting a head start on the next year. I said, “No, these are copies of my masters that I’m taking to my sister’s farm house in South Dakota.” I continued by asking them what we’d all do if a big tornado hit Kansas. I’d lose everything. I don’t have a paper/pencil back-up anymore. Got rid of that about ten years ago.
Now I just switch out jump drives where my teaching, writing, home docs are all saved. My sister keeps it in a safe place. We also have an external drive at home on which we regularly back-up my items and my husband’s photography files.
Some may call me paranoid, but believe me, after you’ve lost a well-designed 200-page creative writing booklet of kids’ work (luckily I had paper copies and the texts of their work was saved on something else so I just had to re-import and re-do it all), you’ll never again not back-up your files. I don’t mind backing up in the cloud, but then one has to make sure the Internet works. Operating off my jump drive allows me to move computer to computer and not worry about Internet connection if I’m in the backyard, in the car, or at work.
Rachel Kent
Better safe than sorry! And it takes away the nagging worry, too.
Jennifer Zarifeh Major
I use Dropbox, and I have backed up files on my laptop, and I have two different email accounts, with two completely different providers, and I send things to myself so that wherever I am, I can access either of those emails, and check on things.
Me, my CP and several writer friends each send each other files for safe-keeping. And if North America loses internet, I have back up files in Australia.
I warn you all though, don’t send big, important files over dial up or low speed internet. Last summer, I had to leave the REALLY LOW wifi at the cottage we were renting, drive 20 minutes to town, go to MacDonald’s or Tim Horton’s, and use their half decent wifi to send stuff to send and receive stuff for my editor. I noticed I was missing chunks of copy, and that some of the copy was scrambled.
It wasn’t all bad, cuz it made for some nice, air conditioned driving away from the family drama…just sayin…
Rachel Kent
Thanks for the warning about low wifi! I wouldn’t have guessed that it could mess with your files like that.
Michelle Ule
We’ve used Mozy for years to automatically back up our data once a day. It’s been invaluable when we’ve purchased new computers as well, for then we can just download everything off the cloud onto the new machine.
Wouldn’t be without it for peace of mind.
After 14 moves, I can tell you what you can do today about most of your possessions.
Walk through your house and take a 360 degree series of photos in every room. Insurance won’t be happy, but they’ll take it as proof you own something in case of a catastrophe.
It also will be a happy reminder years later when you’re wondering about that house or if you owned something in a given year.
A note on losing work from someone who has lost it. Vexing, sob worthy, and frustrating though it may be, rewrite is always part of this job. 🙂
Rachel Kent
Great ideas!
I should document with photos.
Davalynn Spencer
Good reminder, Rachel. Two years ago, the Royal Gorge Fire evacuation line was a mile from our home. I packed a laundry basket with important documents (all in a single expandable file), camera, hard drive (on which is my entire computer/photos), purse and a few survival things. Also, necessary meds. That way if we got the word to leave, I could pick it up, put it in the car with our dog and we’d leave. Also, if pets are involved, have some food stashed in your vehicle for them. Even for yourself. Evacuations can last longer than we expect. In the last three years, fires in Colorado Springs wiped out entire communities. Those homeowners didn’t go back until new homes were built. But fires or not, I always email the latest version of my work-in-progress to myself. Haven’t gone the Cloud route yet, but should.
Rachel Kent
Medications and food! Great suggestions. I wouldn’t have thought of those.
I am so glad your house was okay. I remember that fire.
NLB Horton
Rachel:
From our ranch house in 2002, we watched the smoke from the Hayman Fire summer and repeatedly passed the southern fire line on the way to and from the Colorado Springs airport. The fire line looked like lava flow on a National Geographic film. We come from Tornado Alley (the DFW Metroplex), where evenings in the closet while tornadoes bounce around are a rite of passage.
In 2002, we kept bags packed by the door in case we needed to evacuate. On top of this mountain, we built a walk-in, fireproof vault in my closet. We also use a large, fireproof gun and document safe. We store important paperwork and other treasures in these. (We also built a stone, steel, and rock house with a metal roof after witnessing all the fires. The best defense is a non-combustible exterior.)
We back up electronically, and I send my WIP, once it’s past preliminary edit, to my kids to store until I ask them to delete it. The reality is, electronic storage is vulnerable, too, on a national security level. We think it’s best to have both paper and e-storage whenever possible.
Rachel Kent
Great advice! You guys sound ready for anything! I need to follow suit.
Teresa Tysinger
We backup important documents to an external hard drive as well as our iCloud account. Photos and videos are stored there, too. But, recently our iMac had a “catastrophic hard drive failure” out of the blue (cue heart palpitations)! At moments like that you realize just how many things you hadn’t thought of. While my separate chapter files for my novel were all backed up on a USB (for sub’ing to my critique group), I lost the first draft file. I tried to convince myself that saving the first draft was maybe a good thing, haha, but I still hate it. The kicker is just what you’re saying–it can be avoided. Why put yourself through panic in the moment when you can rest easy knowing you’ve backed up.
Great post and reminder, Rachel!
Rachel Kent
Thank you! And I’m sorry you lost that early draft. 🙁
Janet Ann Collins
Since the Lowell fire is not far from my home I’ve been thinking about the same thing. I keep a thumb drive of family photos in my purse, which is usually in the room I’m in. But only some of my writing will fit on one of those and I can’t keep updating it. I don’t trust the cloud because I’m afraid it might get hacked. What’s the best thing to do?
Peter DeHaan
Many, many years ago when working as tech writer, I lost a week’s worth of work because of bad backup practices. Now I’m extra careful:
Each time I finished writing on a piece for the day (or even when I take a break, I do the following:
– Make a copy of the document on my main computer.
– The document and it’s copy are automatically backed up to cloud storage
– Copy the document to a second computer
– The document is automatically backed up to a second cloud storage platform.
– Once a week I make a manual copy of all my documents to an external hard drive. (I keep that copy until I run out of room. I can see my WIP from last week, last month, 6 months ago, even a couple years if it goes back that far.)
When it comes to safeguarding our work, we can’t be too careful.
Golden Keyes Parsons
I read this blog regularly, but have never jumped in with a comment. However, this topic hit a hot button for me. We had to evacuate in the face of a forest fire in Red River, NM, in 1996. We had about an hour, so we grabbed photos, important documents, some clothing and sentimental items. I was not writing at the time, but have often thought about what I would be sure to take with me this time.
I back up my day’s work with a flash drive, plus we have Carbonite for all my other data. I also have DropBox, but I’ve not really used it that much. I’m thinking I might start taking advantage of it as well.
Good post. Thanks!
Cynthia
Dropbox, first and foremost. I also have MEGAsync, and an external hard drive that can almost keep everything on my PC on it. My laptop is also becoming an external storage device, upon which I download copies of my latest writing via Dropbox and other important documents, regularly. Last night, in the middle of the summer monsoons here in Tucson, I was able to work on my novel even after the power went out briefly, thanks to my external drive and laptop.