Why don't more writers backup files?

[mdamians]

I remember half a dozen times that an author has to redo a whole story when their computer dies due to a virus.
The resulting story is usually of lesser quality then the earlier posted chapters.

Their are many free online storage options for files such as Dropbox which has 2 GB free storage.

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A great free program is Netdrive that lets you mount a network drive as a local drive.
I used to do this when I had a router with a built in hard drive.

Most laptops have a memory card reader built into them and is a great place to store files without a usb stick hanging out.

 

[trevelyan1983]

Eh, for most of the writers I know and more than a few I've read in the past, the first time you start thinking about backing stuff up is usually after you've lost it all.

After that, you get real smart about it.

 

[mdamians]

This guy in my class almost lost everything when his laptop died from a virus. He actually bought a new hard drive which i am not certain was necessary. Another guy in the class had a recovery device to get the files back off.

 

[goldenarms]

Eh, for most of the writers I know and more than a few I've read in the past, the first time you start thinking about backing stuff up is usually after you've lost it all.

After that, you get real smart about it.

Pretty much this.

Also, most writers, from what I've seen, usually give up writing when their hard drive crashes. They lose the will, though it was probably long gone before then' they were just continuing the story out of a sense of obligation to the readers and the hard drive crash just turns into an opportunity.

Or it was totally fabricated.

Either way, same result.

 

[Mereo Flere]

It's funny, I thought I had lost a file today.

I was kind of panicking, until I realized I had it backed up online. I also found some files I had been working on, but had forgotten about.

So, the moral of the story is don't use your external hard drive as a cup holder.

 

[mdamians]

I always wanted to get the cup-holder attachment for a computer, but i only have a laptop and not a desktop.

 

[Mereo Flere]

I always wanted to get the cup-holder attachment for a computer, but i only have a laptop and not a desktop.

What do you call the CD tray, then?

 

[trevelyan1983]

I always wanted to get the cup-holder attachment for a computer, but i only have a laptop and not a desktop.

What do you call the CD tray, then?

Damned flimsy, is what I call it. Broke my favourite cup when my last CD tray buckled under it.

 

[mdamians]

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I can see someone doing this.

 

[Coeus]

Personally I think many authors just use it to drop a story. The IRL excuse is quite common to. What I dont get is why. If you dont want to write stuff just say your bored with it.

 

[goldenarms]

Personally I think many authors just use it to drop a story. The IRL excuse is quite common to. What I dont get is why. If you dont want to write stuff just say your bored with it.

A lot of fanfic writers aren't very experienced. Most of them are in their teens and impulsively slap "hot off the press" stuff up on FFnet. Most stories are little better than ideas and they have no direction or plan -- I bet most don't even have an ending in mind for their stories, which is arguably the most important thing -- if you don't know where you're going, how will you ever know what direction to take? And a lot of them are only writing "for fun," so they don't really care too much about their stories in the end.

 

[seitora]

I'm just trying to figure out how so many people always have a virus hit their computer or whatever.

I've been using PCs for 15 years and I've never, ever had to reinstall my OS or anything.


@goldenarms: it's along that same rationale that a lot of people put up polls to decide character pairings. Outside of one or two examples, if somebody does that, usually his or her story isn't worth reading

 

[Fenrir]

Well, it's like a lot of people said as far as not really thinking to do it until something happened. I lost a lot of stuff once just because my computer was pretty old and gave up the ghost. I kept writing, of course, but, to this day, a lot of stories are incomplete since I was disheartened by the chapters I lost.

Now I back up stuff in at least three places.

 

[shiki]

You know, I always figured that most using the virus thing or hard drive crashing to either be an excuse or because they don't have any anti-virus and are unable to troubleshoot their own issues.

That said, some might be true because hard drives do fail on occasion.

Plus I would bet that a bunch of people that write fics probably do it on pretty old hardware. Word processors can run on pretty much anything after all.

@seitora: reinstalling an OS could be due to lots of things. Like when AVG screwed people over with a really bad update last year. That screwed me up pretty bad.

 

[Glimmervoid]

I lost some chapters of something I wrote a few years back. I'd taken my laptop on holiday to do some writing and it was an old thing, the kind of laptop that needs minutes of careful fiddling with the power cable before it would start charging. It worked okay on holiday and I got three or four chapters written. When I got back, however, I plugged it in, spent the normal amount of time fiddling with it, and was greeted by a cloud of black smoke coming out the back. Needless to say, it was a while before I could get my files of that laptop. In the end I needed to mount the hard drive in an USB-external hard drive holder. Thankfully, I'd made a full back up of all files before I left so I'd only lost the stuff I did while abroad and even then only temporally.