Save Your Work!

     Last week I knocked a glass of water into my MacBook keyboard. The screen went blank immediately. I mopped and dried and waited to no avail. My laptop was dead and I envisioned two years of work going up in smoke.
     I thought I was safe because I saved my work every so often to a thumb drive and kept it at a remote location. Not so. The version of Rim to Rim, my completed manuscript, on the memory stick was a month old. Editing is an on-going process for me.  The loss of my notes and outline for my current novel, Wolf Pack, worried me most. I didn't know how to replace the work I'd done.
     I knew that the longer moisture sat on the circuits, the worse the damage would be. The next morning I hurried to the Apple store and waited five hours for an appointment with a computer genius. I confessed my clumsiness and he expressed his sympathies. He examined the laptop and quickly determined that circuits were corroded and the unit had sustained Stage 4 damage––the logic board, the casing, the trackpad and MagSafe. $750. My only question was . . . Can you save my memory? He wasn't sure.
     The young man with the black gauges perforating his ear lobes was wonderful. He said that since I hadn't lied to him about how the damage occurred, he'd waive the charges . . . the entire $750! Wow. So I bought a external hard drive for $89 and asked him to transfer whatever memory he could onto it before sending the damaged laptop out for repair.
     The memory transferred successfully and saved me from worry and dread during the week without my laptop.  Let this be a lesson:
     1)  Back up your work frequently
     2)  Save current versions of your work on memory sticks and store them at
          different locations.
     3)  Send an e-mail to yourself with your files attached and leave it unopened in
          your mailbox. You can retrieve it by logging in from a different computer
     4)  Buy an external hard drive which saves your work and automatically up-dates
          itself -- cheap insurance.
     5)  Never lie to an Apple computer genius.

Have you experienced a computer damage horror stories ? What do you do to safe-guard your precious work?