RIP Laptop (at least until it's resurrected)

Oh my gosh, you guys. A couple weeks ago my laptop was kind enough to warn me the hard drive was going to crash, just before it gasped its last breaths. So you might have noticed (or not) that I haven't been too active in the blogging world lately. Apparently, once you get that warning, your computer means it. Now it's just a cool-looking, shiny silver accessory with a pirate sticker on it, hiding under the couch because I want to cry every time I see it. Luckily it's still under warranty, but we need to wait until payday to send it to the manufacturer. In the meantime, I grab whatever computer time I can get on my husband's PC.

But really, aside from the terrible blogging and Facebook withdrawals, it's not that bad. I could have lost everything, but I was ready this time. The same thing happened to me a few years ago with my old laptop, except I was stupid then and didn't have any reliable backups. I backed up every once in a while, whenever I remembered, but my brain only remembers things like useless trivia about 80's bands - not really anything important.

So, that time, I lost a lot of writing. The entire rewritten section of my WIP, and almost all of what I had written of Cobalt - 6 chapters or so. Not a smart thing to do if you're a serious writer! Since then, I've backed up my writing almost every time. I used to do it manually, until I found an online backup program called Dropbox and I freaking love it! Check it out, if you're on the hunt for a reliable backup system. The files you put in Dropbox are saved online, and you can access them from any computer that has it installed. I still manually save my stuff to the network drive every once in a while, but now I don't have to worry about forgetting and losing anything new.

I hope you all have good backup systems, and if you don't, you better get your butt in gear and back that work up! Don't end up in tears like I did when I lost all those hours of hard work.