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demiurgentI have lost writing before.
It's nothing new, of course. Everybody loses writing. In the early days of home computing we all learned to back our floppy disks up because we had that one disk fail, and in those days that one 5 and a half inch disk contained your entire electronic existence. Every poem, every story, every badly rendered scene you'd never show anyone and every piece of absolute literary gold you were positive would one day redeem all of humanity through its profundity. Losing your floppy disk was like having a chunk of your brain cut out.
In more recent years, it's happened less often. But... well, I'm hard on computers. I'm hard on computers and I'm hard on computer media. I've had multiple complete hard drive failures in the last ten years, and sometimes, I've lost things. Important things and unimportant things. And years later -- years later -- I find myself scouring old repositories looking for them.
So I've become paranoid.
I have a Mac, so I have Time Machine, and it backs up every variation automatically. I have a backup image for my whole hard drive I use as well. But for my actual writing folder -- the folder where all my creative work lives -- I have a subversion repository and every now and again I back that whole freaking thing up to a server in another state.
Just in case.
I have no point, save that I just backed it up again, and it occurred to me... I've become paranoid. I've reached the point where I am so afraid of losing bits of writing I do -- regardless of quality -- that my backup procedures have become almost absurdly redundant. And yet somehow I know -- I know that if I have a true failure... the one thing I need will somehow not be backed up anywhere. It will magically slip through the cracks.
I know this will happen. I know it. And I know that whatever I lost I could easily have saved, if I had only just.... X.
I spend my life trying to figure out what 'X' is.
It's nothing new, of course. Everybody loses writing. In the early days of home computing we all learned to back our floppy disks up because we had that one disk fail, and in those days that one 5 and a half inch disk contained your entire electronic existence. Every poem, every story, every badly rendered scene you'd never show anyone and every piece of absolute literary gold you were positive would one day redeem all of humanity through its profundity. Losing your floppy disk was like having a chunk of your brain cut out.
In more recent years, it's happened less often. But... well, I'm hard on computers. I'm hard on computers and I'm hard on computer media. I've had multiple complete hard drive failures in the last ten years, and sometimes, I've lost things. Important things and unimportant things. And years later -- years later -- I find myself scouring old repositories looking for them.
So I've become paranoid.
I have a Mac, so I have Time Machine, and it backs up every variation automatically. I have a backup image for my whole hard drive I use as well. But for my actual writing folder -- the folder where all my creative work lives -- I have a subversion repository and every now and again I back that whole freaking thing up to a server in another state.
Just in case.
I have no point, save that I just backed it up again, and it occurred to me... I've become paranoid. I've reached the point where I am so afraid of losing bits of writing I do -- regardless of quality -- that my backup procedures have become almost absurdly redundant. And yet somehow I know -- I know that if I have a true failure... the one thing I need will somehow not be backed up anywhere. It will magically slip through the cracks.
I know this will happen. I know it. And I know that whatever I lost I could easily have saved, if I had only just.... X.
I spend my life trying to figure out what 'X' is.