There’s one irrefutable com­puter law that I had burnt on to my brain in high school: backup your files con­stantly. Com­put­ers can turn off at inap­pro­pri­ate moments, catch fire, for­mat discs, and do many other hor­ri­ble, hor­ri­ble things to your pre­cious data on a whim.

Of course back when I was first taught this rule, the con­cept of a USB stick — a small solid state mem­ory device the size of a fin­ger — was pure sci­ence fic­tion. And so for some rea­son, I thought the rule didn’t apply.

Gen­er­ally USB sticks are great! They’re small, light­weight, nearly inde­struc­tible and they’ll cer­tainly han­dle a wash­ing cycle or three with­out issue.

How­ever if you hap­pen to mis­place one it will dis­ap­pear for­ever. Spir­ited away by what I can only assume are some sort of gnomish pack rats. And that’s exactly what hap­pened to mine yes­ter­day. I went to grab my USB stick and noticed it wasn’t in my bag with all my other junk. I had a quick look around the house and couldn’t find it, so I assumed/hoped it was at work. Unfor­tu­nately this morn­ing I arrived to find my desk a USB stick free zone.

And here’s the kicker. On that stick was my com­pleted Script Frenzy entry and sev­eral thou­sands words of my novel. The last time I’d backed it up was about 5 months ago. I put all my trust in know­ing the loca­tion of the stick at all times, and because of that I’ve lost every­thing since.

I’m sure there’s a good part to all this, but right now all I can think of are those wasted hours I spent typ­ing out those thou­sands and thou­sands of words. And I’ve only got myself to blame.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.