Got
Your Back - Up?
As you likely well appreciate
things happen that can totally derail your efforts in anything and as we're so
dependent on computers when things go wrong with them it can impact our songwriting
and almost every other aspect of our lives.
Fortunately there
are measures you can employ to protect your artistic endeavors that can range
from free to just modest cost either within your home and or online.
Let's
take a look at the basics and see how well prepared you are to get it all back
together in the event of one of life's interruptions.
Are
You Backing Up
It is highly advisable to at least have
an additional hard drive either in your desktop case or externally to load things
onto simply for storage.
Should your computer's main hard drive
crash then you've got a second drive to save you.
And though
this is a good step it's clouded by the fact that your now second hard drive,
your backup only one, could succumb to a virus that infects your main computer
or in a tragic event like a fire you could loose it all as your computer and your
backup drive are in the same location.
But if you're not backing
things up at all and you want a second drive right at your disposal then getting
a second drive is a good step.
Get Found In The Cloud(s)
These
days having your head in the clouds can be a lifesaver. We're talking about cloud
computing services. Basically any storage or software operation that happens online.
With
companies like Carbonite
and even backup services provided by anti-virus companies like Norton you can
store all of your data files, like your songs, online at reasonable cost.
In
the latest advertisements Carbonite in particular has been offering unlimited
storage for $59 per year.
If you're on an Apple system then
you've got iCloud as a primary
option.
A big advantage to services like these is that if you
have a complete hard drive failure in your computer or complete loss of your computer,
like you loose your lap top or there's a fire or flood at your home, all is saved
offsite on the servers of a company like Carbonite or in some other type of cloud
server service. In this regard these cloud servers might better be called savers.
Also,
in the same vein but something that works double duty as your work space and even
free online storage is to use something like Google Docs to do all of your lyric
and chord based lead sheet writing on.
Google
Docs is similar to Word and you use it on your own screen just like you would
Word that's software on your computer but it's all online. So when you've created
a document on Google Docs and you log off your work is accordingly stored online
automatically and forever for you to access anytime from any computer or even
your smartphone.
On Google Docs you can even upload your current
word processor documents and have them all online from now on. And again it's
free.
Trees Still Work Too
In spite
of these great digital advances even electricity can sometimes go on hiatus or
our computers just break down or networks go down and we can't use them to get
to our songs either in the computer itself or online.
Good
old paper still serves a purpose in this hi-tech world. Printing out all of your
song lyrics and lead sheets and any other pertinent documents for each song and
putting them in a filing cabinet can be a lifesaver as well.
Granted,
you may loose your paper files in similar types of disasters noted above - or
just an unfortunate spill of coffee - but again they're better than no backup
and you could even keep an extra set at another location like your car or some
other place like your work perhaps.
And to be environmentally
green about it you can do it all on recycled paper.
In short,
good backup helps get you back up and running much easier and faster if and when
crashes of one sort or another occur.
Have you got your back - up?
MasterWriter
