A couple of weeks ago we had a 3-day weekend marking the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. I took the occasion to go away and write. You may remember my rubbing it in that I have a cabin in the woods. Do you recall my obnoxious flaunting of the cozy photos? Like this one of logs blazing in the fireplace?
Imagine you’re at the cabin over the long weekend. You’re not just lolling about, mind you. You’re at the keyboard for hours a day. Flannel shirt, cup o’ joe. No CSI Miami reruns for you; there are blog posts to be written and by gad, sir, you’re gonna get it done.
And you do. After three days of dreaming up things to say and turning those hope-laden intimations into actual words and then buffing them up till they’re finally ready to go, you catch yourself walking past the mirror and there you are, looking rather pleased with yourself.
So, now that it’s all done, take everything you just wrote and put it in the fire.
If I’d looked in the mirror now, I’d cast no reflection. Like Dracula.
I’d stored all these documents on my thumb drive. That’s what they always tell you to do, right? Back up your stuff to a thumb drive.
Except that I saved everything to the thumb drive and nowhere else. I don’t have internet access at the cabin. I have two computers, one at the cabin and one at home. I take my files back and forth between them by way of this thumb drive, see, and . . . .
How do I describe the progression of horrible moments? The first one, when I plugged in the thumb drive at home and nothing happened? Or the next day, at work, when the customer service guy in the IT department said no problem, we’ve got a tool to fix this? Just leave it with us, he said. Or an hour later, when the IT technician down in the sub-basement called to say the first guy had it wrong? Seen this kind of thing before . . . never can say what causes it . . . hell, could have been static electricity . . . next time, store it in one place and back it up in another.
I can tell you this. The loss of something you’ve written feels uncannily like a broken heart. And who needs another one of those? I was, and remain, inconsolable. The only useful step—as with a broken heart—is to get back in the game. But the part of you that’s gone is gone.
This has happened to you, right? That day your hard drive crashed? Everybody’s got a story. It’s become a universal experience . . . just like a broken heart has always been.
So let’s learn from this. You can’t google “creative writing” or “writing advice” or any other related phrase without getting somebody’s 10 best writing tips or keys to finishing your stories or secrets of getting published. Let’s put all that stuff aside—even my own “Writing—Step One”—and mutually agree on the single best all-time indispensable rule of writing:
Store it in one place and back it up in another.
The photo: Neil Young sang “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” but that was before we wrote on personal computers. This video, by the way, is very wonderful.
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
The gods saw you flaunting your cabin. And we know they can be most unsympathetic when a mere mortal acts as if they occupy Olympus. My thought is that, although they usually send unexpected fire, this may have been their way of reminding you of your rightful place.
Oooo… that's too bad. No copy at the cabin computer? No dialup??? I've learned to make backups of the backups (and I'm still paranoid 'bout loosing those).
From now on, Lario, it'll be backups of the backups for me. I was thinking hard copies, too.
Perhaps there's a reason we still have paper and pens…
Kaze's loss here reminds one of other grievous losses, such as the time one of Hemingway's wives lost a valise full of stories, or the moment last summer when eight months of my journal (Jan-Aug 2009) disappeared for no good reason from my PC. It seemed as if I'd lost eight months of my life.
I had a near miss a little over a year ago with this. Now I write with Time Machine running so that I'm storing the original on the hard drive of my laptop but my computer is making backups of the entire hard drive at regular intervals on an External Hard Drive. Every so often I send my work in progress to a friend in Indiana. And I do all my editing in hard copy. Even still, if my laptop and my external drive were destroyed in a fire while I was at my day job? I'd lose a month's worth of work.
I know exactly how you feel! I, too, have a story. I sat down at my computer with a nice bowl of popcorn and a glass of iced tea, ready for many long hours of work. Then I knocked over the entire glass of iced tea onto my laptop. The hard drive was fried, and I hadn't backed up ANYTHING. In the end I was very lucky, because I found a data recovery service. Now, like The Green Bandit, I work with Time Machine. And I upload finished documents to Google documents.
GB and Heidi – This is interesting, don't you think? We've mortgaged one of the most precious parts of our selves to an "unstable technology." As if life was unstable enough to begin with! I told the story of my thumb drive to a friend and he said, "I have two words for you: cloud computing." And I thought, how about a pad of paper and a pen?
I always said "Take my first born, not my first draft" Before computers I would print multiple copies of what I had written and place them in very safe places….like the freezer, trunk of my car, at a friends house, in the safety deposit box. I honestly did. What a nightmare to loose those oh-so-precious words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages…….
Nancy, we should start a support group! Did you ever hear the story of Thomas Carlyle and his first draft of "The French Revolution"? He gave it to his friend John Stuart Mill, whose maid lit a fire with it. Thanks for your sympathy.
And to think there are real problems in the world like war, hunger, extreme poverty…come on folks…
True, Anonymous. But the subject of this blog is story telling.
The retina is a transparent, paper-thin layer of nerve tissue at the back of the eyeball on which the eye's lens projects an image of the world. It is connected by the optic nerve, a million-fiber cable, to regions deep in the brain. Get in the habit of memorizing your data. The Brain is more complex and efficient than any computer.
Tim – Clearly, your brain is younger than mine! I can recall every line of poetry I memorized at age 20, but I can't remember the names of my coworkers when I pass them in the hall.
One thing which I do religiously:
I save my file as Manuscript_WORKING-COPY.doc
Then I save it again as Manuscript_20100204.doc right before I quit writing for the day. This gives me a dated file for the current changes.
Then I copy BOTH FILES to a USB drive.
The next day I edit Manuscript_WORKING-COPY.doc and start the process over.
Why? I have had it happen to me and to other writer friends: Sometimes the save goes badly and the file becomes corrupted. If that happens, and you copy it to your USB drive into your normal location… congratulations! You now have TWO copies of a corrupted, un-usable file. Or, better yet, you are working on the file and the computer freezes. The file corrupts while you are in it. And for some reason the file on the USB key is 10 days old because you forgot to backup for a few days when you were in a rush.
With my method, I have a JOURNALED history of all my changes by date. I can go back at anytime to a revision and recover.
Just my two cents.
BTW, I work in the Info Tech industry, and I am very conservative about backup/recovery. This process works!
Thanks for the advice, Daron. One thing I know now is that it pays to play it safe. I just wish I could remember what I lost!