Steampunk Writing and Thumb Drive Blues

It happened again. A friend had a thumb drive die. Of course it contained the only copy of a file that he needed.

Thumb drives are good, useful, even necessary, but they will fail just like hard drives.

Always back up your files on two or more thumb drives. And keep the drives away from the computer and each other. Back ups won’t do you any good if the thief that steals your computer or the fire that destroys your computer also get your thumb drives and your back up flash/hard drives.

In the race to escape a disaster such as the recent Thomas fire you may not have the time to take your computer or be able to get to your house to save your computer or backup drives. Disasters happen fast.

If you have stuff stored on the cloud don’t get cocky. Cloud services have closed down and all the data on them was lost. A good hacker may one day find a way to hack AWS, evernote or one (or all) of the big cloud services.

Don’t store your only copy of your book, article, photos, etc. on one cloud service, on one hard drive, on one thumb drive. It’s your book, your life’s work, protect it, make several copies on several different medias, and store the media, the hard drive, thumb drive, even floppy, in several different places.

Big thumb drives are cheap. Keep one on you person. Keep another some place other than your house. Jerry Pournelle used to store back ups of his writing in a safe deposit box. A garden shed would do or even burying it in a flower pot by the back door if you have no place else.

Whatever you do; backup and then backup some more.

Bad things happen to data. Be prepared.

Stay strong, write on, and back it up.
Professor Hyram Voltage.