Document maintenance

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I had a hard drive wipe. My computer had gotten a virus. I was in college, and rather than try to clean it out (perhaps they couldn’t), the campus tech support decided to reformat the entire thing.

I fancied myself an archivist back then, but I was still inexperienced. I had all my school papers not only from those college courses but all previous papers through middle school stored on that hard drive. But it was just one hard drive. It never occured to me to use any external media of any sort.

Let’s just say I was pretty unhappy for a long time.

Right now, “Syncope” exists in four–yes, FOUR–complete forms. I have fully formatted versions on my laptop, my PC, a USB flash drive, and then the current online version. Then I have every individual chapter plus its matching notes in triplicate, since those are online-formatted with tags and individually uploaded during updates. Three copies of my full outline. Three copies of every single research piece I’ve scraped up over the years.

Excessive? Perhaps.* But when you lose a fifty-page senior thesis that was your crowning achievement in high school, you might react the same way.

Lesson of the day: For feck’s sake, BACK IT UP. ^_^

* I think a document comparison thingie of some kind would be easier. Hmm.