Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. (Oh, come on. All public service announcements start that way)
This is a Writers’ Service Announcement.
This is a public call to all writers to back up your work. Right now. Immediately. I’m not kidding. Go do it. Have you done it yet? Now? Okay, good.
As I have mentioned here before, I operate to get my words in every day by sending my WIP file back and forth to myself several times a day. To work. From work to home for lunch. From home to work for afternoon. To home for the evening. This is great for backup copies of files within Gmail which has veritably unlimited storage space. I usually wouldn’t lose more than a day or a few hours of work. However, it also means boocoodles of temp files. Because when you download a file it doesn’t go to wherever you normally keep your WIP files. It goes to the temp folder. This is no big deal unless you are in Windows Vista which evidently somehow hides access to the freaking temp folder. Again, no big deal unless your entire night’s work was actually saved to the temp file and you didn’t know it, so that when you sent your file to yourself this morning it was actually yesterday morning’s file and when you went to find the file you slaved over last night, it wasn’t there. GAH! Can we say near heart attack? It ended up being okay. I found a loophole and managed to get into my temp folder and located the file I edited as early as this morning and saved it to the appropriate location. So when you download your file, IMMEDIATELY save it to where you really want it. I normally do this, but sometimes I slip up. Just wanted to offer a friendly reminder to all of you to go ahead and back stuff up.
That’s it.