We all hear about the importance of periodically backing up your hard drive. Sure a few of us even learned the hard way.
Well I learned the hard way with my USB stick. I was writing the Magico S5 review at home and in my spare moments at work and that USB sure seemed a great way of carrying the file back and forth. That is, if you back up your file on your hard drive and stupidly I didn't.
So Thursday I have an hour break at work and decide to put the finishing touches on the article. Insert the USB stick into my work computer and for some reason can't find my file. Remove the stick, reinsert and disaster strikes. That dreaded "format your stick" error message appears on the screen. Try and couple of times in a couple of different computers but no dice. By this point I am cursing but there's nothing I can do until later. Finish work at 1 PM and take the USB stick to my computer tech. He looks at the stick and says it will cost you $300 to recover the files. Hell no. Try a couple of software packages and no luck in retrieving the information off the stick. Luckily I had a hard copy--albeit it a couple of generations removed from where I was--to go back to. Better than starting from scratch though. So spent an hour or two retyping the 3000 word piece today and then have been re-editing again. Sadly though, there were other partially written reviews on that stick too without any hard copy that are now history.
Moral of story: backup everything.
Well I learned the hard way with my USB stick. I was writing the Magico S5 review at home and in my spare moments at work and that USB sure seemed a great way of carrying the file back and forth. That is, if you back up your file on your hard drive and stupidly I didn't.

So Thursday I have an hour break at work and decide to put the finishing touches on the article. Insert the USB stick into my work computer and for some reason can't find my file. Remove the stick, reinsert and disaster strikes. That dreaded "format your stick" error message appears on the screen. Try and couple of times in a couple of different computers but no dice. By this point I am cursing but there's nothing I can do until later. Finish work at 1 PM and take the USB stick to my computer tech. He looks at the stick and says it will cost you $300 to recover the files. Hell no. Try a couple of software packages and no luck in retrieving the information off the stick. Luckily I had a hard copy--albeit it a couple of generations removed from where I was--to go back to. Better than starting from scratch though. So spent an hour or two retyping the 3000 word piece today and then have been re-editing again. Sadly though, there were other partially written reviews on that stick too without any hard copy that are now history.
Moral of story: backup everything.

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