I don't need no stinkin' backup. Wait, yeah I do.

This past weekend while cooking meatballs for the little one's 3rd birthday I was revising my WIP and had gotten some good stuff. I incorporated more of the love interest's issues, which will create more tension when my main character meets her mother-in-law. And I realized that there maybe something medically wrong with the mother-in-law causing her to be difficult; I'll see how that plays out.

Anyways, I was actually pleased with what I had gotten down. So imagine my distress when I finally get back to  my WIP this week and the computer is locked up with all the edits gone. Yep, gone. And when I restarted the computer, the recovered files had nothing of my edits. Nothing.

Fortunately I was able to recreate most of it, and I think it came out stronger than before. So maybe it was a good thing. All that extra work done before I remembered my Time Capsule backup, which I remembered as I was write this entry. So ...

Hold on while I enter my Time Capsule ... just a little bit longer ... Yay! The backup contains my edits, so now I can pick and chose for the betterment of the story. (My Muse is doing a jig, but is still upset with me.)

But back to this post --

This experience has me rethinking my backup strategy. Here are a few of my take-aways ...

• I need to remember that I have the dang backup system and should check it before making extra work for myself. Another Duh moment!!
• It's time to use the cloud more. I was lucky and only lost a few scenes worth of work. But who knows about next time. I've already had two backup drives die on me. I'll be using my Dropbox and iDisk more often now. Just got to make it automatic; maybe more SuperDuper is in order.
  
• I really want a Drobo.

Hopefully this can serve as a warning to those of you who don't have a good strategy. Set yourself up before you lose something important.

As for me, here's to learning a lesson the hard way.