Number One Piece of Advice for Beginning Writers:
Hit “save” every single time you pause to consider your next word.
Because you never know when the power is going to blow for no reason whatsoever and lose your unsaved work.
This message has been brought to you by “gee, I’m glad I established that habit years ago” and a novel of which I have lost not one word.
ctrl-s is my friend.
It’s everybody’s friend.
*nods* At least once a week I feel grateful I had an instructor who taught us the shortcut key for saving.
(Really, though, I just wanted to use this icon.)
I do most things with shortcut keys, honestly. Which is part of why I hate changing programs: half my shortcuts don’t work anymore.
There is autosave in some programs, but I don’t trust it to be as thorough as I am. (Although sometimes I save changes I wish I hadn’t!)
It;s so ingrained now I don’t even notice I’m doing it.
Likewise — until suddenly my entire office goes black. 🙂
You know, it’s sad. I almost prefer to write in WordPress now because not only does that habit save it every minute or so, but it saves it non-locally.
It’s true that a direct enough lightning strike might not just kill my power but fry my machine. But I backup non-locally on a periodic basis (for the novel file, every few days), and in the meantime I trust my surge protector.
Looking at your timestamp, it looks as though it was a city-wide (or at least this-side-of-the-city-wide) event… because I remember waking up and my fan was off, and it was pitch black.
Could be. I have no idea what caused it, though; there weren’t any storms in the area.
Yeah, hit us too. Is your internet still on or are we the only ones with gimp access?
-Crow
The presence of an LJ post should suggest I still had internet, yes. 🙂 Mine appears to be doing fine.
Word has a nice auto save that you can set for a certain number of minutes.
Also, Back Up Copies, because hard drives will commit suicide as soon as they realize your last back up is 6 months old.
Yes, backups too. But last night was a Ctrl-S kind of moment.
Agreed — but there’s a caveat, and I learned this the hard way.
Every single time you hit save (and I too do it automatically, at the end of every paragraph and sometimes every sentence!), Word creates another temp file. And you can build up enough of them to crash your computer, at which point it becomes difficult to find those temp files, and it takes someone with more smarts than I have to recover the work.
To avoid this, you need to actually close and re-open the document once in a while. This gets rid of the temp files.
If someone who knows more than I do about this can shed more light on it, please do!
My solution? I don’t use Word.
Whoops, my bad! 😉
No, Word’s bad. I detest that program.
*stands up applauding* Brava!!!
