There I was, working on my third semester critical essay. Click, save. Break time.
My daughter's Girl Scout troop was coming over for a Pizza/Wii party as a 'thank you' to providing a formidable discussion on female protagonists as role models. I wanted to order the pizza online to get a special "online" discount. Little did I know...
I clicked on the Papa John's pizza link. The page popped up, but suddenly closed down explorer. Weird. I tried it again, even clicked on the pizza that I wanted to order, again explorer shut down. My desktop icons were gone and a "Smart" something box jumped on the screen like it was checking for viruses. I cancelled it and ran my own anti-virus program. TOO LATE.
My entire desktop was wiped clean, itunes, pictures, documents, EVERYTHING. I couldn't panic...I was too overwhelmed with life to panic.
"You need to get an external hard drive, costs about $100 bucks," said my best friend. Yeah, thanks. Will do.
That my friend is a tragic experience for anyone, especially for us writers who have at least 100 first-second-third drafts of one story, exercises, old essays and creative work from eons ago. Save your sanity and invest in an external hard drive.
Man, Alicia. That totally, totally sucks. One thing I recommend to all my writing friends is Dropbox. It's a free service that automatically backs up your writing to online storage as you work. That way even if you lose your computer and external drive, you can still sign in to the Dropbox website and get your stuff back. Seriously, people. Anyone who doesn't use this should download it right now. Here's a link:
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Thank you so much, Peter! This is truly valuable info. How come I never heard of this...writers definitely need to share more tips and tools.
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