Last time, I wrote a fanciful account of how the mystery dog destroyed my data by chewing on the power cord of my computer. Fortunately, our cat hasn't learned to read, so that particular scenario isn't likely to happen.
The consequence of such an occurrence, however, is all too real. Data loss from any number of causes happens all the time. Because our data is truly the most valuable thing we have on our computers, it's worth protecting. And because it's of a different order than paper records, the protection method has to be appropriate to the task.
Protection of data can be thought of as an attempt to prevent corruption or deletion of the data. If the bits that make up my manuscript get scrambled because of, say, the power surge I mentioned earlier, the data is no longer in a useful form. It may be possible to retrieve parts of it, but as an entirety, it's not so useful anymore. If the medium which holds those bits of my manuscript data, gets damaged or destroyed, I'm in a far worse situation. My data, though made of bits and bytes, resides on some physical medium. Destroy the physical, and you've destroyed the virtual.
Let's address that second type of damage to my data first.
The primary way we can insure that our data is kept available and useful to us is by way of redundancy. When you talk about backing up your files, you're speaking of making one or more physical copies of the virtual data that represents your manuscript or music or whatever it is that you have stored in digital format. Multiple copies of your files, stored in multiple places, is the way we prevent the destruction of any one copy from destroying all the data you have.
Therefore, for someone new to data security, my advice would be to invest in some high-capacity flash drives. It used to be that people backed their data up to floppy disks, at least at the personal computer level. Anymore, though, with multi-gigabyte video files, or huge libraries of downloaded music, floppies are an obsolete medium. Higher capacity is needed, and the price of flash memory devices has continued to drop as production has been ramped up, so one or more flash drives are your first line of defense against losing your data. You can find 64 gigabyte flash drives now for $35.00, so buying one or more of high capacity is very affordable. A good compromise is in the 8 to 16 gigabyte size range. These are extremely inexpensive, and can be found almost anywhere. They're sold as impulse items near the checkout counters in discount and grocery stores, for instance.
Get a couple of these drives, and get into the habit of copying your manuscript files to them every day. Develop a naming convention so you can track the daily progress on your writing by date, something like "Work In Progress 20121004.docx," for example. I like the YYYYMMDD format of that date because it's easy to use, and you can visually see what data a particular file refers to. However you decide to do it, when you're done with your writing for the day, copy it to a file named with your naming convention to both drives. And then store those drives in a place where they can be accessed and moved if necessary. If you should need to head to the cellar because of a tornado drill, for instance, take the drives with you. If you've been using a laptop for your writing, take it as well. We're talking your life here, and the life of your data is very important as well.
This is the first step in developing a habit of protecting your computer data. As I write more on this, I'll be developing a more complete procedure for securing your digital files. Remember the Prime Directive of data security: It's not if your data will be lost, but when.
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