Are You Protecting Your Writing?

I was once again reminded how important it is to back up my writing when my MacBook Air did something strange which resulted in having to erase the hard-drive and reinstall the operating system, and the programs, and get all my docs, etc. back on the laptop.

As I said to one person, I'm a "belt and suspenders" and fitting pants type person. This means, I daily save copies of what I'm working on to Dropbox. So if I'm working on a story on my desktop, files get copied manually to go into Dropbox to be put manually on my laptop, and vice versa. My desktop files are automatically backed up by Carbonite.

Saturday was when things got weird. Somehow my MacBook Air decided to encrypt the files. It couldn't be stopped. The progress bar said it would take days, no, years to finish. I tried letting my machine resolve it's problem itself, but after 24 hours it was obvious it wasn't going to. Boo!

Monday I called Apple Support. With their guidance I was able to erase the hard-drive (not a step I wanted to take unless I knew for sure I had to do it), but I wasn't able to reinstall the OS via the internet. Boo! Trip to the Apple store (with an appointment made ahead of time) and system reinstalled. Yea!

Next I used Migration Assistant to transfer stuff from my windows PC to my Mac. Have done this successfully before. This time, it took many many hours, then crashed. Boo! Today I hopefully have caught all the files that didn't transfer by hand copying over our local wifi. Yea!

Then I downloaded Office 365. It failed. Boo! Redownloaded and it worked. Installed. Yea! Working on setting programs up how I want them. Haven't yet figured out why save as isn't working as I want it to. Remember having to change a setting somewhere, but where is it... My sweet husband found it. Really simple when you know how, but not obvious. At least it is fixed. Yea!

So the writing I wanted to work on Saturday, Sunday and Monday and today, hasn't been done. But at least I'm making progress on being back in business. Yea!

If I hadn't been backing up, protecting my documents, there would have been a mad scramble to do so. Or it could have been a catastrophe of failure, if I hadn't been able to back it up. Boo!

Don't lose your stuff by failing to back up! Crashing and burning is not fun.

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