PSA: Never trust a single repository for Important work

Allow me to pause and digress briefly from the current series of posts to remind everyone out there that if you have any work that would be problematic or painful to recreate save it in more than one place.

This is a reminder that we all hear all the time and I think at this point almost everyone either has a personal story or knows someone personally who has lost valuable data or work to a hard drive crash or some form of data corruption.

How is it then that this has not become second nature to all of us?

Well, I'm here to share this message once again from the perspective of someone who though he was being responsible by hitting save regularly but put too much faith in the system of record. It turns out that Blogger.com saves exactly one version of your work and that it very helpfully auto-saves every few seconds.

I have been working on the second installment of the "Privilege from the inside" series and was getting close to publishing part 2 when I came home to discover that we had a power outage and that my desktop had shut down unexpectedly. I was not too panicked by this with regard to the blog because I had been saving obsessively. The post had been harder to write than I expected, so when I got a sentence I liked I immediately hit save.

So I started up my computer, launched my browser and navigated to the blog. The rest of this is sheer speculation, because no one can tell me for sure what happened. The end result was that when I loaded the draft I had been saving so diligently I discovered that it was a 5 day old version that was missing my slow and painful progress.

As nearly as I can reconstruct when I launched my browser it said that the last session had ended unexpectedly and did I want to restore. I clicked Restore. All of my previous tabs came up including the blog. My guess is that my local browser restored an older version of the draft for some reason, and then the auto-save very helpfully saved that version before I could tell it to restore the version that should have been saved to the cloud. 

So here I sit another five days later still trying to reconstruct what I lost because I'm quite sure it was far better than what is coming to me on the same topic now.

There are a couple lessons to be learned here.

1. No single repository is 100% safe. Even if it is on a cloud. 
1. If something is important enough make sure you have independent backups.
2. Consider using versioned storage.
1. Yes, this sort of thing is normally reserved for things like code or legal work where the history and evolution of something might be important.
2. But that doesn't mean you can't use it for something as simple as a writing project.
3. When something happens and you lose some work get over it.
1. Yes, it sucks losing all that careful wordsmithing.
2. No, it probably was not Shakespeare. The only reason you think it was so brilliant is that it isn't around to prove you wrong.
3. Lost work is like the fish that got away, and it is just as pointless to ramble on about it.