Poetry and Prose

While I'm blogging over at DigiCon, I'd like you all to welcome my guest to Terry's Place. Born and raised in New York City, Margaret Fieland has been around art and music all her life. In addition to her writing, she earns her living as a computer software engineer. "The Angry Little Boy," will be published by 4RV Publishing in early 2013.

Why I back up my data, and why I'm glad it's organized.

I wrote poetry for years, scribbling in notebooks that I stuck in a box in the attic, before I bothered to figure out how to organize and keep my poems, and now that I've started writing novels, I have a system all worked out.

What got me started was that I had written a poem I knew I wanted to keep and try to get published. I looked around for someplace to keep it where it would be both accessible and protected. Sad experience had taught me that backing up one's data is vital.

The first time I encountered data loss, I shrugged it off as an aberration. I was working for a place in the west 40's in Manhattan, a little hole in the wall that did data processing for one of the large department stores that has since gone belly up. We were at lunch, in one of the many restaurants that peppered the area, when the conversation turned to smoking.

“John had given up smoking,” Colin, my boss, remarked, “but he took it up again when he deleted our source code. We had to restore it from backup, and he started smoking again.”

“What happened?” I asked.