Backing Up Your Stuff?

So its the same old same old - not backing up stuff or just deleting said 'stuff' when your computer has some sort of mad moment where it pretends to be overloaded.

Naturally I did this and naturally it happened to be two poems that I was hoping to work on and I only discovered they were no longer there when I went on a search for them and found that they'd been wiped out of all memory - even though I had backed up to an external hard drive those things that I though (obviously wrongly) were the things I truly wanted to keep. Where's the justice?

A quick hunt on the internet revealed the existence of time machine type programmes that could retrieve deleted items so I thought I'd give them a go. Not a blinking thing worked. It was as if they'd never existed at all. I even remembered some pretty key words from both poems and searched for those and nothing happened. So my short but sweet posting is telling you that, unlike me, you should really back up all gems of genius to some foolproof place that you won't then obliterate.... and that actually, now I come to think about, it using the good old fashioned method of writing in a writers diary with proper paper and pens is a far better way of doing things.

Yes, I have such an item and in fact its better for tracking my changes to poems and is therefore far better if I then realise that it sounded better before I started twiddling with a certain part. This means that I shall have to see my own hideous handwriting and oh so interesting spellings and learn to love them but as long as I don't lose the pad I'l be a far happier position when it comes to revisiting unfinished projects.

You knew all this beforehand didn't you? Sure, me too but then life would be too easy if I took my own good advice and I wouldn't have wasted a whole two days searching for the unfindable and lamenting what I now think would have been totally killer poem and one with promise..... Still trying to find the up side to all this.....
   

 Here's a little picture to go with one of the comments below.