Yesterday, I had a post all ready for everyone. I had gotten up around 4am (my son woke me up) and started working on a post about job board promotion. I had links and images. I finished up that post just before 7am and hit the publish button.
Then disaster struck!
I checked the post on the blog as I am prone to do to make sure all the formatting came out right. The title was there…. oops, where’s the rest of my post?
The body of my post had disappeared!
I quickly moved through the various levels of loss.
Anxiety
Oh my god! My knuckles turned white as I gripped my keyboard in shock
Anger
Stupid wordpress. I can’t believe you lost my post! Do you know how frikkin long I was working on that!
Denial
Ok, get a hold of yourself, Richard. It can’t be gone. Maybe it’s saved as a draft somewhere. So I looked and looked for a way to recover it.
Acceptance
In the end, I couldn’t find any way to recover it… Well, i guess it’s gone. When I get a chance I will re-write it. It should be much easier the second time around, since I’ve already done it once. Plus I know what links I’m putting in and which images to add.
Recovery
Ok, I made up this stage. This is where I go through the process of recovering the lost work. When I have time, I will re-write that post. So be on the lookout for it. In the meantime, I will use this as an opportunity to write about backing up.
Of course, in my case, my mistake was not periodically saving my work as I was writing. Sometimes we just get caught up in our work and we’re writing away. I had probably written close to a 2000 word post without saving in the interim. That was my fault.
Normally, I’ve very careful about backing up. All my important documents are backed up. You never know when disaster will strike. So it’s important to keep back ups of important things.
Backing up
There are ways to back up that are more thorough than others. If you are simply making a copy of your files on the same computer, you may not be backing up as well as you think. Even if you are backing up to an external drive at home, you could improve on your system.
A few years back, I had a house fire. It wasn’t that bad, since the condo I had was current with the recent fire safety standards. It had the sprinkler systems in the ceiling that went off and saved the house. Of course, you can imagine what happened with all the electronics. Even most of my CD’s and DVDs got damaged and scratched up. My external drives all went under and my computer system was waterlogged. Luckily my insurance covered the damage. If all my backups were at home, I would have lost everything.
The most important things to me were actually those of sentimental value. I had thousands of family pictures, my wedding pictures, and other documents that were on my computer. These are the things that can’t simply be recreated if lost. I was also lucky in that I kept online backups of those things.
It’s good to keep a backup of your important documents on separate drives. It’s best to also have an online backup system as well.
Here are a few of the backup solutions that are available:
These are just a few examples, there are many others out there you can look into Each of these have a free option for backing up a small amount. Usually the free account allows around 1-2 gigs. These all work similarly, you can select items or folders on your computer that you wish to back up. These services will work in the background and automatically backup your selected items. It should all work seamlessly.
I personally use sugarsync, which allows me to not only backup, but also synchronize my data across several computers. I am keeping all my family photos and videos backed up at home as well as on sugarsync. With this type of data, I’ve gone well beyond their 5gb free account. I had started with a 30 gb account for $4.99 and recently upgraded to their 60gb account for $9.99.
In my research, I found pricing to be comparable amongst all of the backup options, so compare their features and pick the one that matches your needs. Just remember, you can re-create a lost blog post, but you can’t re-create memories. So, I definitely recommend backing up!
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Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
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Hi
I like the idea, well done!
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