In all honesty, I have my autosave set to one minute. I have a very, very low pain threshold. I can’t stand losing anything. I get frustrated and feel like tossing my computer on the rare occasions when it decides to throw a hissy fit and I lose a page or two. I’m pretty paranoid, too – I have backups dating back to the mid-90s that I can’t manage to throw away – just in case. I mean, honestly, I’ve written some stuff and not looked at it again for years, and who’s to say that it hasn’t been corrupted since and I might want that old backup? And when I lived in Canada, I kept my off-site backups in a bank safe deposit box and at my aunt’s house in another city – a three hour drive away. Now, I just mail them international mail to the same aunt. Now THAT’S offsite. 🙂
I used to print out a lot of copies of my manuscripts, but now, living in Sri Lanka, where paper is relatively much much more expensive than it was in Canada, I don’t. But I also know that my backups are reliable.
Oh, and another note – I have had my computer stolen – not once, but twice. Different computers. The first time, they stole all the disks and zip disks that were in the office as well. The only backups I had – and yes, I did have backups – were in the bank safe deposit box. Thank heavens for paranoia! If I hadn’t had that, I would have lost literally everything and I would have been sued six hundred ways from Sunday for losing critical financial data for my accounting clients. As it was, I lost only hours of data, but since I had paper copies of everything, plus original source data and my backups were encrypted and password protected, it didn’t matter. It could have been a disaster. Instead, it was a non-event.
The second time, it was my laptop and it was stolen out of the trunk of my car – which had been parked for a mere five or ten minutes – and again, I had backups in the laptop bag. But again, because I’m basically a paranoid person, my most recent backup was in my purse – already in my friend’s house. Plus another copy was in the bank safe deposit box at home. So again, nothing lost – not even five minutes worth of work. Paranoia, again, pays off.
Can you say “paranoid”? :p
