Saturday, June 23, 2007

“Back Up!” the writer screamed.

We’re having computer problems. Not minor ones, but big, you’re-about-to-lose-everything ones. Luckily for me, it’s on my husband’s computer.

It had gotten to the point that some of his files wouldn’t open. The computer guy said files were corrupted and the hard drive was about to die. He took it off to the repair shop in the sky to try to revive it. Two weeks ago. It’s still in intensive care, apparently. Be ready tomorrow. Maybe. We’ve heard that before.

Dave was able to at least back up his files on an external hard drive so he could keep working – on my computer.

Mine’s having some glitches too. Like I can no longer synchronize my Palm to my computer. Can’t even get the Hot Sync Manager to open. I need my Palm. Grr.

Which brings me around to reminding everyone to back up. ‘Course, it’s hard to know what to back up to. I used to back up all my manuscripts on diskettes. My current computer, a laptop, doesn’t even have a slot for diskettes. We backed up to CDs. Can’t get a lot on those. We used smart sticks. Convenient, great for travel when you’ll have access to a computer wherever you’re going. But, still, not an overabundance of memory. Now we have an external hard drive that has enough space for both of our computers. But how long before those are replaced by something else?

I swear, you could buy a computer, take it still in the box to your car, change your mind and want another model, go back inside the store and they’d tell you they can’t take it back because it’s obsolete. Still, it’s better than the pre-computer days. And, yes, I’m old enough to remember those dark ages – my kids are not.

Used to be, parents wanted their kids to become doctors or lawyers. Now, they hope for a computer geek.

In the meantime, I’m not a computer geek or geekette, but if you hear yelling, it’s me. Back Up!

2 comments:

  1. There are online storage sites, too, that might be useful. Personally, I back up to CD and external drive. The external drive is hooked up to my desktop computer. Important manuscripts get backed up to a CD and stored in the trunk of my car (in case of a house fire). I'm a little paranoid about it... ;)

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  2. I, too, am a little paranoid. But in case I'm rear-ended, I keep a set in our bank safe deposit box. Those copies are so old, I'd totally forgotten about them until you talked about keeping a CD in your trunk!

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