Time is precious, especially in an age where we don't bother to really appreciate it as it passes. Yet, many of us play fast and loose with both our work and personal time by neglecting one very simple but easily overlooked task: making backups.

The most vivid reminder to me of the need for backups is from the days when I worked a computer help desk whie in university. Many times a semester, someone would come in nearly in tears, holding the floppy disk that contained their one and only copy of, say, their Ph.D. or Masters' thesis. The disk had been damaged. The thesis was due next week. Could we get their data back. -- Read more

It used to be that freelancing involved a lot of postal mail, and sometimes couriers (which some publishers seemed to use like they were inter-office mail), whether you were sending typed pages or files on floppy disks. Then faxing got involved on occasion, at least for things like contracts. When I did my first book way back when ("Using Eudora" for the curious), it took a bit to convince the editors to let us submit the chapters through email. After all, it was a book about email, so wouldn't that be a cool tie-in? -- Read more