Tonight I will be writing the first words on my new draft of my novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less, that I have written since my hard drive crashed a couple months or so ago and I lost over 80 pages of progress.

It’s been a long, emotional journey back from mourning that loss, and I can’t help but think I was mourning the loss of my mother at the same time, because this is a novel I started writing at around the same time I found out my mother had terminal cancer.

Wounds like that are never fixed with a custom rubber stamp; they stamp themselves on your soul and come out in weird ways. This novel, I have come to realize, is my goodbye letter to my mother, my final thank you.

Maybe that’s why it hurt so much to lose it.

Moving forward, the best way for me to make sure I never lose 80 pages of a manuscript again will be for me to back up my data religiously. Of course, I knew this before I lost so much of my novel, but I just never followed through. No longer.

There are plenty of ways to back up data. I say… use as many as possible and be overly redundant! And always look for a good sale, like the kind you can find at Buy.com. They offer everything one might need to ensure data security several ways and through several methods.

The handiest, of course, is through the use of a flash drive. These things range from small to very small, and usually you can pick up a fair amount of memory for a small price. About two gigabytes will run sometimes as low as five bucks, while sixteen gigabytes can often be had for under forty bucks these days.

But one thing I think is essential is to back up your entire hard drive to a second hard drive, at least once a week. That’s why I like the deal Buy.com has right now on a Seagate 1TB external hard drive. It’s just the thing for the job. While not quite as portable as a flash drive, the external hard drives are much larger (this one would be twice as large as my current drive) and are a breeze to install… just plug it in via a USB 2.0 port, let Windows Vista install the driver automatically, and start backing up your data… remember… once a week, like clockwork.

I’ve shopped around and Buy.com’s price of $131.99 is as good a price as I can find anywhere, and the free shipping really seals the deal.