BazzaRama

Preface

In February of 2025, my wife, Lucinda, and I joined an online community for writers called, Prolific Writers Life (PWL). Founded by Lorraine Haataia, it is a support community to help writers finish their books. Lucinda and I were recruited by Lorraine and her husband Bob to be two of their stable of experts in various fields that help members through their publishing jouney—writing, editing, publishing, launching, and promoting. What follows is a blog post I was asked to write on the importance of computer backups for the PWL website. Of course, backups are important to anyone using a personal computer for any kind of creative or productive activity. So, I decided to repost my submission here on my own blog.

The PWL Blog Post

Originally posted September 24, 2025.

My wife and I recently watched the 2024 film Lonely Planet on Netflix. It stars Laura Dern as Katherine Loewe, an established and respected author who is struggling with the final chapters of her new novel. She’s under pressure to send the manuscript to her publisher. Upon being invited to a writer’s retreat in Morocco, she decides to attend—but not participate—so she can devote the time away from distractions to her writing. Events unfold—as they do in these stories—and she makes the acquaintance of one of the other attendees’ boyfriend, Owen Brophy, played by Liam Hemsworth. Of course, there’s a budding romance. At one point in the film they are at the waterfront sitting on a wall facing the bay enjoying each other’s company. She has her laptop computer in a bag sitting on the wall just to the side and behind her. A hoodlum walks up and snatches it, eventually getting away despite Owen trying to chase him down. Katherine is devastated because all the writing she has been working on for her novel is on that computer. She’s more upset by the loss of those files than the computer itself. She didn’t have any backups.

Backing up your computer files, especially those that are precious in some manner—professionally or personally—is an essential part of our digital lives. Yet, it’s also a task that, for many, slips through the cracks and is relegated to the back burner, if I may mix my metaphors.

Travel, be it domestic or international, is stressful enough without having to worry about someone making off with your laptop. Paula Wagner, author and member of Prolific Writers Life, learned how important backing up her computer was while traveling with her husband to England in the mid 20-teens. They had spent some time in London, Paula’s birthplace, visiting a cousin. They needed to go back to Heathrow to rent a car so they could drive north to visit more of Paula’s relatives. Her cousin offered to call a taxi but Paula insisted on doing it herself so she’d have the phone number for the cab company.

The cab that arrived to pick them up had another passenger or employee in the front with the driver. After loading the Wagner’s bags and heading to the airport, the two in front were chatting away in what sounded like an eastern European language. Upon arriving at the rental car area at Heathrow they seemed to have some kind of problem getting into the Avis terminal. Paula and her husband couldn’t quite figure out why, but the driver took them to another rental car agency where they suddenly experienced a mechanical failure—the clutch went out, supposedly. It was too far to walk back to Avis with all their bags so the driver called for another cab to come pick them up and take them back. It arrived quickly, the luggage was transferred, and they were transported to where their rental car was waiting. The driver offloaded their luggage and as Paula and her husband were checking to make sure they had everything, the cab took off. The briefcase with her laptop was still in that taxi. Paula’s husband later mentioned he noticed that it was placed in the well behind the front seat, out of site from the passenger area.

Fortunately, because Paula had the number, she called the cab company and after escalating the situation to a supervisor was able to convince them to track down the cab and have their missing luggage delivered to them at the Avis terminal right away. Paula’s story ended happily with her computer and all her work on her memoir, Newcomers in an Ancient Land, restored to her so it could be published at last by SheWrites Press in 2019. But it could have been worse because she didn’t have any backups of what was on that laptop. Only much later did she suspect that what she originally thought of as an innocent chain of errors on the part of the drivers was more likely to have been a planned scam! She learned her lesson and has been making backups consistently ever since.

Don’t think it could happen to you? Even if you never have your computer stolen, you’re not immune to losing files. Here’s another real life example from the 1995 film, Sense and Sensibility. The IMDB trivia about that movie states, “While working on the script, Dame Emma Thompson’s computer developed a problem and she was unable to locate the file. She took the computer to Sir Stephen Fry, an expert in Apple computers, who, after seven hours, finally managed to retrieve the script. This is why Stephen is thanked in the credits by the producers.” Kudos to Sir Stephen, but seven hours? The account is sparse on details but I can only imagine that if she had an up-to-date backup, he would have been able to restore the file much quicker, probably in minutes. Or she may not have had to call him at all.

There’s an adage as old as personal computers. The question isn’t if your hard drive will fail. The question is when your hard drive will fail. Most modern computers now have solid state drives built in, which are faster, more reliable, and not as prone to failure due to not having any moving mechanical parts, but they will fail eventually. Software bugs and glitches are more common and could cause data corruption. So, please, back up your computer files. There will come a day when you will be glad you did.

Backups as Easy as 3, 2, 1

There are various backup strategies one can use to make sure you won’t lose data in case of a computer malfunction, stolen equipment, or disaster (we’re living in the age of increased wildfire activity and flooding, after all). I think one of the simplest to understand and deploy is the 3-2-1 backup strategy. You protect your data by keeping three copies of your data, using two different types of storage media, with one copy stored off-site. There are a number of products and services that can accomplish this scenario—too many to go into details for all—but I’ll give you some simple examples.

Three Copies

The first copy is your working copy. It usually resides on the internal storage of your computer, either a desktop or laptop, on a hard disk drive (HD) or solid state drive (SSD) built into the hardware by the manufacturer.

Two Types of Media

The second copy of three is a local backup stored on a second storage device, usually an external HD or SSD directly connected to your computer. For users of Apple Macs, the easiest way to set this up is to use Time Machine, which is built into the operating system. All you need is an external drive dedicated to the backup. It’s recommended the capacity be at least twice the computer’s internal drive capacity. On a Windows PC, a similar functionality is offered using the File History application, introduced in Windows 8. It’s still available in Windows 11 (see the Microsoft support site for other backup options in Windows). Of course, there are other third-party options for both macOS and Windows. These applications make a copy of your files from the internal storage of the PC onto the external drive, which makes two types of media or storage devices.

One Off-site

Here are three options to consider for the third copy of your files.

1. You could have a couple of external drives of identical capacity—equal to the capacity of your internal storage, to keep it simple—in addition to the local backup drive mentioned above. You would copy all your files onto both of these (documents, music, pictures, movies, but not the operating system or applications). Keep one of these drives attached to your computer. The other, keep somewhere else not in your home; in your car, at a friend or family member’s house, or a safe deposit box at your bank, for example. Every so often swap them out, making a fresh copy of all your files before and after the swap. The interval between swaps would be determined by how much you are willing to lose and potentially have to recreate given the worst case scenario.
2. Use a cloud service to synchronize important data. Both Apple and Microsoft offer cloud storage services for this purpose—OneDrive from Microsoft and iCloud Drive from Apple. These have the advantage of being tightly integrated into their respective operating systems, making them fairly easy to set up. They are both also cross-platform compatible—OneDrive can be used on macOS and iCloud Drive can be used on Windows. Other common options include Dropbox and Google Drive. There is an important distinction between a document sync service and a true online backup, however. Syncing your files is mainly for the convenience of accessing your data across multiple computers, tablets, and phones. iCloud Drive by default only synchronizes your Documents and Desktop folders, leaving your pictures, movies, and music (or anything you create and store outside of those two locations) only on your internal drive. OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox all offer a backup option for more folders that you choose, but you may need to purchase more online storage capacity to be able to backup everything.
3. Dedicated online backup services provide another option that is more comprehensive than cloud sync services. For a fee, an encrypted copy of your files are uploaded to an online server using dedicated software you install on your computer. Once set up, this backup is periodically and automatically updated as you change the contents of your drive. These are subscription services where you pay monthly or annually. Features vary from service to service. Some will backup any external drive directly connected to your computer with no extra charge. Some have unlimited online storage, others have different price tiers depending on how much space you need. They may cover only one or multiple computers. Some are easy to set up and others are for tech geeks who like to dive into complicated configuration options. Doing a web search for “online backup services” will turn up multiple articles that compare and contrast various services so you can find the one that meets your skill level and budget.

No matter the specifics, your backup strategy should be…

• Simple to set up and maintain
• Automated as much as possible: set it and forget it
• Tested periodically: every six months or so restore some files whether you need to or not

A good backup can give you the power to write without fear.

And if you should find yourself traveling with your laptop in a bag, sitting on a waterfront gazing at the view or into your lover’s eyes, make sure that bag is not just laying beside you, but is attached to your body in some way.