It was the worst thing, apart from one or two poems, that ever happened on my desk. There was a small flash of orange light, a fzz, and my computer died.
Hello, today I’m going to be talking about backing up your work on hard drives and in clouds and things like that.
I don’t remember exactly when this happened, my computer dying. I know it was a nice, warm summer day. I know this because a few moments earlier I could hear the fan inside the iMac Pro grinding to keep the internal temperature down. It was a warm day because what happened wouldn’t have happened on a cool one.
My computer had died and all that was on it was everything. On it were all the family photographs, not backed up anywhere else. I panicked, or I said fuck.
But I wasn’t at that moment worried about my writing. It was the photographs I cared about. If nothing else with my writing, I had a hard copy printed out of most of what I’d been working on. At worst, I would lose a few days’ work.
With the photographs, we’d have to put our call out to relatives to replace holiday photos, and there’d be a lot that would never come back.
I did some searching around, made a phone call. I drove the black screen to a computer repair centre where they removed the hard drive, booted it up, and told me the photographs and everything else was safely accessible.
And breathe out.
But, they added, I should buy an external hard drive and keep it running some backup software, time machine or something else.
I learned my lesson. In fact, the following day, I went up to Tottenham Court Road and bought two hard drives and kept one in my university office and one at home. Every month, or whenever I remembered, I would swap them over.
The family photographs, as well as being backed up to the so-called cloud, were now in two physical locations, home and office.
what I’ve just described to you is the safest, most fail-safe system of data storage available to the average writer, i.e. me, or at least it’s the safest I’ve been able to come up with in order to make sure that my photos, but also my latest drafts, don’t disappear with a fzz.
If it’s all on your laptop, all of it, everything, all your novel, and that’s stolen, then you’ll be facing a technological/existential crisis. You will have lost months of work.
So I’d advise, and it’s pretty obvious, that whilst this resource is available, you back your work up remotely. This is the best you can do. Have a hard drive that you can carry around with you or leave somewhere else. have a cloud system, have a server system.
Here are a couple of examples of work loss, one bad, one good. Well, bad for the writer.
Whilst I was writing Wrestliana, I deleted a whole chapter by mistake. I don’t know how I did it, I just got to the end of it and it wasn’t saved. And I know, I’m sure it was better and funnier than the redraft that I did when I recovered heart a couple of days later and went back to it.
The chapter was called ‘Ecky Thump’ and involved the goodies and wrestling and northern men wearing long johns and black socks and pants on the outside.
So I know that sometimes work goes and you can’t get back what was in there originally if it was a first draft.
But here’s another example.
One student I taught on the MA in creative writing at Birkbeck had her whole 18,000 word dissertation disappear into a dead laptop. I think she had her own little fuzz or she spilled coffee on it. She had to rewrite the whole thing afresh in about 10 days.
Afterwards, though, she said she thought the new version was probably better. In fact, she was certain of it. She went on to receive a distinction for her dissertation and has gone on to publish a number of well-received books, starting with that one.
When a student of mine now down at the University of Southampton is lost in drafts, I often tell them this story and suggest that they put everything aside, not delete it, not deliberately lose it, but pretend they have and begin a new draft without looking at the old draft. Very often this will make their work better.
So what do you think about that as advice? Is it just too obvious to give? I mean, I’ve suffered from losing work, so I hope you don’t.
(Have you lost a chunk of data? What was it? Did you ever get it back?)
If you’re around Southampton this Friday, I’m going to be speaking at the Mast Mayflower Studios about Activism and Writing. I’m joining some fantastic people from my department, Stephanie Jones and Dina Lupin, and also slightly later on, the poet who went viral with her poem, I Want My Country Back, Louise Fazackerley.
And the fantastic Amber Massie-Blomfield, whose book Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World, is thoroughly recommended. And we’ll be talking about the power of writing to make hope and change and other good things.
I’ve included a link here, so if you can possibly come along or let other people know, please do.
Hope to see you soon.
