I was over 100 pages into my novel, THIRTY MINUTES OR LESS, when tragedy and stupidity combined in a perfect storm and, like a tight corset, squeezed my manuscript back down to about seven pages.

I’ll admit it: I was an idiot.

What did I do? I failed to back up my novel, either on CD-RW, DVD-RW, or even a flash drive. That’s the stupidity part.

The tragedy part was that my hard-drive on my Acer went down like a clown to Chinatown. (In plainer words, it crashed.)

The PC and the drive were both less than 10 months old when this happened. I didn’t back up my novel, or my hard drive, prior to this. The biggest culprit here was arrogance; I thought that with such a great new PC, I’d have plenty of time before I’d have to worry about a crash, so I never set up an archive, nor did I back up anything, unless I had to transport it between home and work PCs.

I lost a ton of stuff, but the piece that hurts most is the 90-some pages of lost manuscript from THIRTY MINUTES OR LESS that I had never backed up. Now I have to fall back on the seven or so pages I had sent to an agent via email, and was still preserved in my online email account.

Consider it a second draft, I guess. But that’s a lot of lost work.

Best advice I can ever give any writer relying on PCs, hard drives and such? Back up your work; often. Invest in both an external hard drive, so you can make a ghost-copy of EVERYTHING on your hard drive, and then re-archive it once a week. (Or use the Carbonite.com service to accomplish the same thing.) And then hedge your bets by saving anything vital to a flash-drive. And maybe even a DVD-RW.

Heck, do it all, including the Carbonite.com solution. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you can never be too cautious with your important data.