This morning the laptop I was writing Catherine's Grandchildren on completely died. The thing was quite old. I am not sure exactly how old, but I know I had it when I first went to SOAS almost six years ago. Fortunately, I had saved everything on a disk yesterday. So I only lost what little editing I had done this morning. In total I only lost about 30 minutes worth of work.
I transferred the manuscript from the disk to another laptop which I think is about four years old. I hope it can last another three weeks so I can complete the book manuscript. At any rate after loading it on the other laptop and retyping the lost work I realized I only had one back up copy now. I also had no spare disks. So after some freaking out I decided the best thing would be to e-mail myself a copy of the manuscript. Now I have a safe copy in cyberspace. I also got a couple of spare disks from Chris O'Byrne today. Tomorrow I am going to put a copy of the manuscript on each one of them. That way I will have multiple back up copies of the manuscript and should be able to get the book finished by my 12 June 2007 deadline without any horrible mishaps.
Dear Otto,
ReplyDeleteWhat a relief everything was not put to waste! Just be sure to date the extra copies properly, as it is always confusing with having too many spare copies and backups. I have some firsthand experience of this. Though, having an extra copy is always preferrable to too few. Once I sent an entire manuscript on CD to Routledge and gave the only other copy to a co-editor, as I was going abroad. As we were later about to proofread everything, my colleague denied ever having got the CD, and we had to ask Routledge for our own manuscript. Quite embarrasing...
Yours,
Vilhelm
It makes me wiggle at times when i think that something might actually happen to the cyber space, big parts of my so-called life would be lost forever, LOL...
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