Month: April 2022

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted here, and it’s been quite a busy time.

On the writing front, I’ve completed several short stories that made their way into a spy fantasy collection titled The Vatican Shadows. In addition, I went through all the short stories I’ve written in the past year or so and added two more collections: Making a New Start and Mageweaver.

Making a New Start is a series of stories about Nidintu, one of my Babylon characters, who kept hanging around until I wrote about him.

Mageweaver came about after a conversation with my sister, Margaret, about weaving, and she was kind enough to license the image of one of her latest creations as the cover. Margaret is currently deep in preparation for the latest iteration of Heallreaf, a tapestry exhibition that she conceived, created, and is now in its fourth iteration.

All of these are available in digital and paperback at most stores, or directly from this website in digital only.

Stay tuned as there are two more collections coming from that backlog review, and potentially, a third.

I’ve been very fortunate over the years not to have a home or computer event that causes me to lose hard or digital copies of stories or other data I keep on my computers. Dean Wesley Smith tells of how he had a fire in his apartment and lost a novel and uncounted short stories. If I recall correctly, this was back in the 1980’s, so there were no computer backups.

Everything was typed manually, and stored in hard copy.

I have some of my stories in hard copy, but not all of them, and I see that as an option I’ll get to in the fullness of time. I often pride myself with the fact I have three or four thumb drives and a 4 Terabyte external drive where I keep regular backups of all my writing and other data. At less than $20 for a 64 Gigabyte thumb drive, cycling several into the backup process is pretty straightforward.

I was thinking about this one morning last week, reminding myself it was almost two weeks since I’d copied everything to a backup drive. Which was when I started thinking about the location of my computer, and those backup drives.

The computer, obviously, is on the desk in my office. The 4 Terabyte drive is on the right-hand drawer. Two of the thumb drives are tucked into the front pocket of my organizer, and the third is lying on the desk beside the laptop

Which means, if we have a fire, or a tornado rips through, everything is in the same place and those backups won’t help me one bit. Yes, I do have Dropbox, but mostly for current work in progress only. If everything goes sideways, that won’t help, and neither will the fact all my backups are within three feet of the computer itself!

So, the first thing I did was relocate one of the thumb drives into my bedside cabinet. The second was to make use of the one Terabyte of Cloud storage I get with my Office 365 subscription. It’s not ideal, but it’s a start.

Where are your backups?