A good friend of mine had something happen that will probably make all of you want to vomit when you hear it. His hard drive died... with about 8 years worth of writing on it. Eight years of work - GONE.
I can hear a few of you now - "Why didn't he back up his work?" He did. It was on a flashdrive, the very same flashdrive that was plugged into his computer when it suffered whatever surge claimed the hard drive. Apparently, this surge was enough to render the data on the flashdrive unrecoverable.
Back up everything in multiple ways. My friend was able to recover some of what he was missing thanks to the fact he'd emailed several scripts out to other friends. However, these were only PDFs, which means he has to retype everything into Final Draft. It also means that he lost many, many interim drafts that were not send out for public consumption and he lost any newer rewrites.
My new policy is to email myself a copy of the Final Draft file and the corresponding PDF each time I complete a draft. That way there'll always at least be some sort of back up in cyberspace in my email folder. This isn't a foolproof plan, but between backing up like this, and via flashdrives and shutting material between my two computers, I hope I can reduce the odds of losing my entire creative portfolio in one swoop.
Seriously, don't let this week go by without putting double redundant backups into place. You don't want to end up like my friend.
