Whoa! Back it up!

So lately I've been a bit distracted from blogging.  Well I don't know if distracted is the right word so much as 'had my computer stolen, lost a heap of work and didn't have a computer for a while'.

Yep, that's right.  Someone broke into my house in the middle of the day when I was out and stole my tablet.  

Needless to say I was creeped out, annoyed and upset that someone had the nerve to come into our house (through our window), pull everything out of our bedside drawers, go through the house and open cupboards etc.  But to add to that, as I said earlier, I lost a massive amount of writing work as well as photos and so on.

My point to this other than the need to rave?  Back it up!  Everything you have on your computer, back it up!  I had sometimes wondered what I would do if my Surface stopped working, but it hadn't occurred to me that it would be taken out of my bedroom.

Yes, I know, I should have backed up.  I should have stored it all to an online server or at the very least, backed it up to a USB key, but I didn't.  So there's no point me dwelling on what I could have done differently.

Thankfully, due to me having way too many social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr - although this one is very new, etc) I haven't lost a massive amount of photos.

I had however just finished the first draft of the second book in the Caterina Boston series and was getting it ready to put on Kindle.  I unfortunately don't have a copy of that and haven't found the enthusiasm to rewrite it at the moment (I'm probably just sulking, it will pass).

On the night we discovered the break in I tried to think about how much stuff I'd lost.  I'm told (and Google confirms) that it would be quite difficult for someone to access my Windows Live account and there are other reasons it's unlikely someone is looking at my stuff (SO not putting info on here re how to get around things like this because definitely not going to assist anyone in their endeavours around this!).  I also doubt the person or people who stole it broke in so they could read my latest book, so I'm not too worried about this part.

So how much did I lose?  Around 200,000 words.  I'm not going to pretend that all of those words were gold (highly unlikely) or were even necessarily usable in the future, but it's not the point.

So writing this post to remind people of the importance of backing up your computer.  Whether it's because of photos, personal information, or writing work from the past eighteen months, if it's important, get something like Drop Box and start backing it up!

On a side note, if anyone does consider breaking into our house again, we now have a super fancy alarm system with laser beams crisscrossing the hallways, a team of highly trained ninjas living in the roof and a giant dog with three heads like the one below.

We were going to get sharks with laser beams attached to their heads but it turns out they can't chase people unless they're in water - and I didn't want to have to clean their tank all the time!

(Some creative licensing may have been used for the above however no ninjas were harmed in the writing of this blog).

Until next time, read, write and continue with the geeky fandoms!