Fortune, Fortune Cookie

Oddly, This was a fortune I received today as I was plotting a drastically different direction for a novel. I had departed from all my conventional and contrived comfort.

A wacky invention will lead to your success.

I didn't even order Chinese. It was an unclaimed cookie on the counter at the shop and I nabbed it.

I'm hardly the fellow who goes in for this sort of bullshit. I'm nearly a mad scientist, for Dog's sake. A serious sort of mad scientist.

It felt good, nonetheless. The plot direction I had sketched was certainly in the "wacky" realm. I'm not usually that sort of absurdist.

I do love Catch-22.

So, some good karma to share.

For $12, I have in my hand two new 8 GB flash drives (USB 2.0) from Amazon. I'm able to back-up my writing and my writing software onto these drives taking something less than five minutes. This is much more convenient than my cyclical household backup.

With two drives on the desk, there is good redundancy. With five minutes, there is good time management. I fire DBAs who loose data. There is no excuse for lost data, ever. If it is important enough to need, it is important to keep in serial volume backups.

Please, do yourself a favor and order a couple of these USB flash dongles and do daily whole-file backups off your hard drive. With two, even a fault on one is unlikely to leave you in a lurch. Cloud is cool - and I'm a huge (many TB) cloud data guy - but I make sure we do physical backups of our data which is under our positive control. You should as well.

Please. Before something happens and your hard drive dies, I beg you to back-up.

Here's a link to a 16 GB version for $10. (here). I love the cloud but for important things, I want them in my hand as well.