Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Another snow day, again

the local schools have called off again today, on account of drifting snow. The last thing they want is a student losing control after plowing into a drift, or a bus. I can guess my day will be spent picking up toys and stopping arguments at regular intervals throughout the day.

I did finish the first draft of my Bait story. It is tentatively titled Undertow but that is subject to change between now and the final edit. I think today will be spent on a novel instead of a short story. It should be a nice change of pace.

I was thinking (man this post is jumping around like a bullfrog on a campfire) about my backup system for my stories. I don't store any of them on my computers hard drive. I had a lightening strike that took out a computer a year and a half ago and I lost most of a book (Okay so the book sucked but I learned a lot writing it) I was working on. I had to re-write most of it and I am pretty sure I liked the first version better. Now I save everything to a flashdrive. Intermittently, I back up that flashdrive to CD. When a story gets finished I make a paper copy and put that in a filing cabinet and when the story gets accepted I make a copy on CD and put that in the file folder as well, then I can delete it from the flash drive. It is a conveluted system but it works. I also haven't had lightening take out my computer since then.

10 comments:

Rob Brooks said...

How stable is a flash drive? Any chance of that failing at some point? I've started using one as well, but I back up my writing on my computer most days. I'm actually in the middle of organizing my printed records right now. I'm not a very organized person, so my wife's helping me.

Good luck getting some work done today.

Aaron Polson said...

Flash memory is pretty darn stable, especially compared to hard drives. It's the old "moving parts" issue. Flash drives don't have them; hard drives do.

The main drawback to flash memory is the cost per unit (gigabyte or whatever). Case in point: iPod Nano vs. traditional iPod. The Nano uses flash, the traditional a hard drive.

Aaron Polson said...

Good luck today Jamie; snow days can become quite maddening.

Jamie Eyberg said...

Rob- I have used the same 1 gig flash drive for the last year and a half. I haven't had any problems with it but I still keep paper copies of everything I write. Just in case.


Aaron- I know, second snow day in a week. I think I will go crazy. I wish I could take the kids to the zoo or something. BRRRR!

Anonymous said...

I like the title "Undertow". I like cool-sounding, simpole titles. In fact, I am currently trying to reformulate my Dead Bait backup based on a title I want to use...

Jamie Eyberg said...

That is one of the reasons I might have to change my title.

Fox Lee said...

Why does lightning love computers? There are better things to strike. A few celebrities leap to mind.

Jamie Eyberg said...

Nat- AAAAATOMCRUISECHOOOOO! Bless me. ;)

Carrie Harris said...

The lightning thing won't work on the Cruise, you know. It doesn't hurt zombies.

K.C. Shaw said...

I back my writing up to a flash drive too, and then I back it up further to my Asus eee laptop, which has a flash drive for a harddrive. The real problem for me is making sure I don't accidentally save an older version over a newer version. I've pretty much stopped bothering with paper copies.