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My Dog Ate My Homework (or what to do if our computer crashes)

© Laura Elvin

This article is being submitted a tad late... details follow!

This is a segue article. Meaning I'm temporarily unable to give you a meat-and-potatoes article about getting your stories published because I am.... without computer. Yuck! So, that's the subject of this article.

This isn't the first time I've had a computer die on me, so I was somewhat prepared. I want to go over a few ways you can prepare, head the bad stuff off at the pass, so to speak.

You won't always get a warning about an impending system crash (by system crash I mean something along the lines of you losing everything that was on your hard drive), so it behooves you to stay somewhat backed up in a few different ways.

The following are things I've learned along the way (learned the hard way, mind you): BTW, I can't put bullets or fancy numbering in this article because I lost the instructions on how to do that and my time is too limited on this borrowed computer to go look it up... sorry.

Back up your files... SOMEHOW. The easiest that I've found is a zip drive that came with my last system. It's IN the CPU, so I didn't have to add anything or configure anything. Yeah! You can use the zip drive to back up your entire hard drive, or (like me) to just back up files. (I can always load software again, but files are lost forever.)

Back up your files onto diskette too. I hate doing this because I tend to run around from one computer to another, then, and mess up sometimes by changing a file without realizing I was working on an outdated version of my file. Still, it doesn't hurt to have your stories backed up once a week, once a month, whatever... onto floppy disks.

And right here, right now, I just saved this document, even though I'm only halfway through. It's a habit and a darn good one. As you type, save the file often... now this leads to...

Set an automatic "save" feature into the default of whatever word processing software you use (assuming you're using a computer for your writing). Here's how it works in Word97 (other systems may vary): Go to TOOLS, OPTIONS, FILE LOCATIONS... See the one that says "AutoRecover Files"? Highlight that one and if it's empty modify it. What you're doing here is telling Word where to save a file you're working on if it crashes. There may be a default directory there, like c:\temp or something. I like mine to be obvious, so I create a directory specifically for this purpose then assign Word to put my crashed files in there (to keep them separate from anything else because they aren't easily identifiable by file name once they've crashed). I make a subdirectory called C:\Crashed Files (ingenious, huh?). Okay, we're not done...

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