Week 3, Day 21

There are only two kinds of computer hard drives:

1.  Those that are dead.
2.  Those that are dying.

In other words, plan on your hard drive dying because that's what they do.  They are mechanical pieces of machinery that break down like anything else with moving parts.  While we are typing our NaNoWriMo stories, they are working silently in the background - saving our creative ideas in the form of binary code.  Hard drives are also used by your computer's operating system as paging files (temporary RAM).  They are busy little devices that eventually poop out and quit.

Mine bit the dust last night - may it RIP.  Needless to say, I'm annoyed.  Even though I make regular backups, the last backup date for my NaNoWriMo files was Wednesday.  The two chapters I wrote since then are now figments of my imagination.  I can write them again, but that puts me behind 4,000 words.  Rats.

To protect your NaNoWriMo novel, do the following:

1.  Make copies of your work to a thumb drive on a calendar basis, i.e. every day or every other day, as needed. 
2.  Email your newest chapters to yourself every time you write one.
3.  Buy an external USB hard drive and back up all your files (complete) or whatever is new (incremental).
4.  Print a hard copy (paper) in case you have to re-type.

There are lots of backup utilities available on the Internet.   The safest bet is to use the one that came with your computer.  If you have your Windows XP CD, you can launch the backup utility.  Here's the URL with instructions...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx

Keep writing.  And protect that writing.  Back up your work now!