Back Up Your Work or Lose Your Mind!

Everyone knows that it is important to backup your work, right?

Right?

It is more so for writers. You can spend days or even weeks slaving over your book, only to have the computer hit by a power surge, a virus or even your thick fingers that did not mean to hit the delete button and all that work is gone.

There are many ways of backing up your work.

• You can use your computers own back process with the ability to Restore to an earlier date, as before the virus entered your system.

• Save it to an external drive or thumb drive

• E-mail it to yourself, especially if your e-mail account is on-line

• Use a service like Dropbox, which saves to a cloud.

Whatever way to decide, you have to do it religiously and don’t allow yourself to get lazy and complacent.

But there’s more!

I saved my masterpiece on a thumb drive as well as to the hard drive. Once in a while, I would e-mail the manuscript to myself. And then tragedy struck!

Last weekend, my computer was invaded by the Locky Virus Ransomware. What this virus does is encrypts all your word documents (.doc), using the RSA-2048 and AES-1024 algorithm, which can only be decrypted by a key. The authors of the virus promise to send you once you pay them the ransom fee which is around $200. If you Google the virus, all articles are adamant that you not try to pay because there is no guarantee that you will see either the key or your money again. Below, you can see a sample that the extortionist leaves as a text message.

There are a couple of software saying that they can rid your system of the virus, but a computer tech, that I trust has told me that the virus comes with a timer. Erasing the virus helps for a while until the timer releases the virus a couple of months later, and you lose your files all over again.

Let me make it clear. There is no way currently to get your files back. Your entire hard drive must be formatted, thereby erasing all .doc files.

To add insult to injury was the fact that my thumb drive was attached to the computer at the time that the virus went live, so all my backup files were lost as well. Although I lost hundreds of files of research and writings, I had just sent my first book to a publisher, so I was able to retrieve the original manuscript. In the case of my current novel, it was open when the virus went live, so I was able to save it to a .docx and a .PDF format, which the virus did not attack.

Everything else is gone.

Now that my computer is clean, I have taken the advice of my computer tech buddy and have started an account with Dropbox. From now on, I will be saving to that account. I will also save it to the thumb drive, but I will disconnect it after I save the file. And I will also e-mail a day’s worth of writing to myself, just in case.