Thursday, January 17, 2013

Back It Up!

We have some extra teenagers living in our basement right now.  We call them the Trolls. They are twins,  high school seniors and legal adults, but for reasons I probably shouldn't blog about, they live with us instead of their parents.

Mr. Stanley and I aren't real foster parents, but we're trying. Our goal is to keep a roof over their heads and get these guys to graduate from high school and get jobs so they can move out of our basement. Because our own kids are probably going to have to move down there, but that's another post.

ANYWAY, they have these research papers due. Two months ago. Which is probably going to keep them from graduating if they don't get it in gear.

Anyway.

They have all their information on the cloud drive thing that the school system provides.  And of course, Tuesday, when they were supposed to have things turned in, the system crashed (coincidence?  I have my doubts).  So I said, "Don't you have a flash drive?"

Blank faces in duplicate.

*Runs upstairs and finds a flash drive without any naked romance scenes on it*

Okay, so we got that worked out, I think. They now know to save it to the cloud, save it to their laptops, email it to themselves, and put it on the danged flash drive! 

So this morning, I went to open my WIP, which I had emailed to myself at work, (good girl) only to find that somewhere in the stratosphere, the last scene had disappeared.  Which is probably good, because I was thinking that I needed to cut it and start over, but HEY!  I wanted that to be my choice, not the internet's! 

So anyway, today's public service announcement:  BACK IT UP every chance you get, whereever you are!  Hey, that sounds almost dirty, doesn't it? 

3 comments:

  1. Excellent advice. I do a great job backing up my writing files. Not such a great job on my photos, though, so thanks for the reminder. =o)

    And good luck with your Trolls. ;o)

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  2. Very good advice. I back up my laptop once a week, and I use Dropbox for everything else. I did a whole blog post about it a month or so ago. It acts as a folder on your computer, but no matter where you are, so long as you have internet, you can access anything in that folder. I keep all of my current stories there, so the second I hit save on Word, it backs it up. I also have Dropbox on my phone, so whenever I take a picture, it automatically downloads to Dropbox and I can access it anywhere, without ever needing to manually back it up. It's all free, and you start at 2 GB, but the more you use it, the more space you get! I'm at 5GBs =)

    I second B.E.'s comment-- good luck with your Trolls (so cute that you call them that!)

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  3. Very good advice. I backup all the time.

    Also, you and your husband are good people. :)

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