…because I’ve lost the flash drive that I keep all of my writing on. And I mean ALL of my writing. Twenty-Five, The Death Effect, all of the drafts of novels I haven’t finished, ideas I’ve only written a few sentences of, my short stories, my poetry, EVERYTHING.
Now, normally this wouldn’t be such a huge deal, because I post everything on TNBW and it serves as my “back-up” in case something like this happens, but about a month or so ago I had a bit of a breakdown. I deleted everything from TNBW except for two short stories that I was entering into a contest, Twenty-Five, and The Death Effect. So the good thing is that Twenty-Five is all there. There may have been some editing I did without updating the site, but the whole book should be there. The Death Effect I think is almost completely there, but there may be one or two scenes that I hadn’t updated yet. Luckily, anything that isn’t on TNBW should be hand-written in one of my notebooks.
What bums me out is some of the poetry and short stories. There were some I didn’t hand-write but typed immediately. And I had all of my reviews from TNBW saved in separate documents for every project I ever posted. I won’t be able to get those reviews back if I can’t find my flash drive!
So, any ideas for the best way to back-up your writing should this ever happen again?
I Picked Up a Pen One Day... 
I back up to an external hard drive, but more importantly, I save to Dropbox. Check them out online. It’s accessible from any computer/pda.
Is dropbox free?
Yes.
I feel so bad for you. I really do. What I do is every week email a copy of my book to myself. Just attach and send. I never change my email and because i have a few different emails, I can do it.
ann
I have faith that I’m going to find it. I have to find it!
I actually lost my usb drive last week for about three days before I found it again (in the bottom of my car no less). Luckily, I have my work saved in two other places: my computer and a CD. I update the CD and usb periodically though probably not regularly enough. I also recommend using Google Docs. It’s free and gives you unlimited (or practically unlimited) storage and you can edit stuff using Google Docs and download between there and your computer very easily. I used it often when I was in college had had a desktop that I couldn’t take with me to the other side of campus.