So, the sun goes down on another Sunday evening. The week has passed quickly, speeded along perhaps by the excitement of spending Tuesday evening in the casualty department. So far all seems well with number 2 son (previous post for details) – no harm done, other than a manly scar above his hair line, which, if he takes after his father he won’t have to worry about until he hits his forties and his hair line decides to make for the back of his neck. All that remains is to coax him onto his bicycle again, when he’s ready. Other news: moving on in Tai Chi – Broadsword now pretty much explored – to be practiced in private for the rest of my life, along with the Jian and the Old Frame. Begun Pau Chui, otherwise known as Cannon Fist. Watched a video on You Tube showing the way Master Jesse Chan does it, and I’ve had to remind myself I’m pushing fifty years old and I must be mad for even thinking I can do this without putting my back out. (Actually I may already have ut my back out) There are slower versions, such the one I’ve seen performed in such a sublime manner by Master Chen Zheng Lei, and this gives me some hope. Either way I’m looking forward to having a laugh over the autumn and the winter as I go through it.
Michael Graeme now has two short stories out in the field, so to speak, languishing in an editor’s intray – one of them since April. As for my satirical short story “A Moth on the Moon”, response has been immediate and gratifying. It seems to be doing well on Feedbooks, and one kind soul has even listed it as his favourite. I feel another short story coming on, which I hope to flesh out over the coming weeks. In addition I’m currently muddling my way through three novels, and I have a couple of essays coming up to the boil on the subjects of meditation, Swara Yoga and, well the mystical path in general.
In addition to all of this, I’ve been looking around for a portable hard drive – which finally brings me to the heading of this post. It might sound mundane, but with so much of my life on the other side of this computer screen, I can’t afford to run the risk of not having things backed up. Indeed, past experience has led me to make a point of never keeping anything solely on a computer, be it writing, photographs or mp3’s. This isn’t paranoia: Computers get dropped, stolen and occasionally eaten by a virus. These things really do happen, and it’s best to be prepared.
I was reading the blog of an amusingly paranoid conspiracy theorist recently who’d lost all his important data from his computer – his conclusion being that some sinister government agency had hacked in and trashed his hard-drive because he was getting too close to the truth of whatever it was he was ranting on about. More likely, though, his hard drive had been knocked, or simply died or his anti-virus software wasn’t up to date and some nasty code managed to wriggle through. I wish I had the self belief that my own work was of as much interest to other parties, but it really isn’t. This is not to say I wouldn’t be devastated though, if I were to lose any of it.
So, I keep hardly anything solely on the computer at all. My writings, and in particular my works in progress are on SD memory cards, and these memory cards are backed up to a pen drive, and as a last resort, all of it is then further backed up to the computer itself. If I lose the computer, all I lose is the back-up data. Photographs are burned regularly to CD, and, in case the CD’s get scratched these are now backed up to my brand new Western Digital Passport, which gives me 250 Gigabytes of portable space, and all for the sum of just £50.00. For good measure I’ve backed up my writings onto this beast as well, in addition to keeping a copy of my iTunes library on it too. I can’t imagine ever filling 250 Gig! But I probably will.
The problem now though is what if the Passport gets dropped?
Should I get another as a backup?
I was talking to a salesman in the well known highstreet electrical retailer where I got my portable drive from. He was young, fresh out of university, and was explaining to me how he’d just dropped his portable drive and lost five year’s of his life. He was pretty calm about it, I thought – I was gutted for him, imagining pictures from his gap year, and hundreds of student parties, girlfriends, mates, places he’d been, old course notes, a copy of his thesis maybe – all gone! He said he’d just put it to a corner of his mind, and tried not to dwell on it. I thought I had a philosophical outlook – but this young man was a veritable Lao Tzu! He now runs two portables, each a mirror image of the other. I’m sure Lao Tzu would have done the same.
It’s a very modern anxiety, this business of data security. It’s also a personal thing. My few thousand photographs and my writings aren’t really of any interest to anyone but me. In a recent post, I spoke about the Buddhist notion of non-attachment. Were I a proper Buddhist, I should be able to take everything I’ve ever written, published or not, and simply delete it. But I don’t think I could ever bring myself do to that. My writings are my delusion of immortality, and to detach myself from that is a test I would never pass.
Perhaps a writer can never be a good Buddhist?
Anyway, on a slightly less philosopical note, if you’re reading this, you have a computer, and the chances are you’ve got stuff on it you wouldn’t ever want to lose – those holiday pictures? The snatch of video you got of your child taking it’s first steps, or saying its first words? If you haven’t already done so, you need to be thinking about backing it up. I read one advert for a portable hard drive that urged you to “put your life on it” – well maybe you should, but take some advice from an old hacker like me, and make sure you’ve got it backed up somewhere else as well. Just in case.
Don’t wait until you’ve lost it in order to discover how valuable that data is to you!
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