Do you know where your stories are?

This post is very late, please accept my apologies. I had everything typed up and ready to go and then I left my laptop on a plane somewhere between St. Kitts and Washington DC. It could have been devastating. Of course, there was one absolutely brilliant short story that I had written that I have now lost (I dare you to prove otherwise), but other than that, everything was backed up, so my loss was the hardware, which is significant but thankfully replaceable.

So this post is on the mundane issue of backing up. We can write the most articulate and mind-blowing stories, however, if we don't back up, we are basically playing the lottery with our work.You don't even have to be as careless (I prefer 'temporarily confused') as I was to lose your data. A power surge (ok, maybe that only happened in Ghana), a random hard drive crash or a virus (a whole other topic) can cause you to lose all of your data.

You can use CDs, DVDs or flash drives but my personal opinion is that it is never a good idea to keep anything sacred on media that is so easy to misplace or to sustain damage. External hard drives are also a good option, although you need to keep them somewhere separate from the rest of your hardware so that if there is a physical problem - power surge or fire, it will not affect your originals and your backups.

Cloud backups (backups to online servers) are becoming very popular now and are a good option. Some are free, but most are inexpensive. This is a good option once you go with a reliable provider.

What do you use for backing up your work? How often do you backup? Share your experiences with us.