Writing Practice Prescription

I offer you one big apology if you came to this blog today looking for any post made after June 1, 2008. It’s all gone–vanished in the thin, unknown atmosphere of the cyberspace universe.

I worked on another website two nights ago under the careful guidance of a GoDaddy help desk employee. Yesterday morning after attempting to log in to this website, I discovered that the whole database-in-the sky had simply disappeared. Two phone calls later  with marginal help and some uncalled for finger pointing from the GoDaddy help desk, I wasn’t much better off until this a.m. when a small voice of early dawn awakening gave me one more thing to try–and Voila, I was able to restore everything from June first backwards.

Save, save, save your data must be the mantra of every writer. I have long trained myself to hit “Control + S” to save data that I an working on when the phone rings or someone comes into my office to talk. In addition, I back up all data on my hard drive at least once a day onto an auxiliary disk. What I failed to realize when I started this blog, and then lost everything around the new year of 2008, is that the data in a blog lives in the sky on the website database, and not on my desk. Bummer. I did have a learning experience the first part of the year and started backing up my database on the website which I last did on June 1st. Current learning lesson: database once a month is not enough. Freebie learning experience: GoDaddy help is variable, indeed.

I have a friend who began a book and over the period of days made a lot of progress, each time minimizing the document but never naming and saving it. One day it vanished, never to be found again by the best of the experts called in to play hard disk sleuth. To this date, the elusive words of that first draft have never been coaxed back. I have the same experience with some of the posts on the first version of this blog. Now I’ll see if I can recall what went down between June 1 and now.

Back to the old keyboard.