Backups Of Shows | The Sound Archives of John Leonard

Business & People News content from Live Design: A local newspaper story caught my eye recently. According to the article, a woman sitting at a sidewalk café table had her laptop snatched by a couple of thugs on a motorbike. This was traumatic enough for the victim, but worst of all, the report went on to say, was that she lost four years’ worth of work on her second novel, the only copy of which was stored on a memory stick, which was plugged into the laptop. Being the subject of a robbery is a pretty painful experience, and losing four years’ worth of writing must be devastating, but what bothered me about the story was why on earth there was no backup for this irreplaceable material at all, over the course of four years. The laptop was an Apple MacBook Air, probably one of the simplest machines to back up, either to an external drive or to one of the many cloud services available, and a text file, even one containing a novel, is small enough to drop onto a second USB stick in a minute or two. It’s a lesson hard learned for this particular lady, but I’m willing to bet that she won’t make the same mistake when she finally gets around to rewriting the book.