Saving My Work (And Recovering a Deleted Creative Piece) : Nicole Pyles

I am constantly having to remind myself to save my work and to back up my files. It’s not something that comes naturally to me, despite the many instances of losing files and even my laptop crashing at one point (oh ye bluescreen of death).

Recently, I finally convinced myself to buy a backup drive in order to back up my work. I actually purchased the Western Digital external hard drive, and despite a few quirks, it’s been far easier than I’ve ever thought in the past to back up my writing and my computer files.

As a writer, whether you blog, write short stories, or write novels, you always want to have a second (or third) storage area to save your files. Computers crash, cloud drives get hacked into, and SD cards get lost. Always back up your work.

Yet, I’m not always that mindful of saving my work in various places like that. For example, I created a video poem from a poem my mom wrote and uploaded it to YouTube. Somehow, I managed to accidentally delete it (there needs to be an “are you sure?” feature to every single delete button everywhere.) Well, I could have sworn I have saved it somewhere, and I searched through every email, computer file, and cloud drive. It was nowhere to be found.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t saved it! That ended up fueling my desire to keep every single piece of creative work that I create, even though I risk being a hoarder if I pursue that. Anyways, at least with digital work, it doesn’t take up physical space.

Well, I let it go, because what could I do? And then I decided to peruse online, see if I could find it somewhere else.

Folks, I’d like to introduce you to the Wayback Machine. If ever there is a website or something you’ve published online, that you’d like to get back, the Wayback Machine is a great place to start for you to get back your stuff. So, I managed to get the link of the YouTube video that was deleted, and I put it in the Wayback Machine, and there it was!

Somehow, thanks to clever googling, I found a way to download the video from that old archived link, and got my video back. It’s now uploaded again on YouTube and viewable for all to see. In fact, I”d love it if you take a look at it here:

Isn’t it beautiful?

So, a few takeaways:

Save your work. Back it up somewhere, even if you have to spend a few bucks a month to get access to a Cloud Drive. Save stuff you didn’t think you’d ever want to look at again.
The internet is forever. Okay maybe forever is an exagerration, but it’s pretty permanent. Just think of all those tweets and social media shares people think they can just delete it and how so many of us are able to find out about it anyways.
Celebrate your re-discoveries. If you find something you’ve created that you appreciated and forgot about (or thought was long gone), celebrate it! Share it! Things like this help you regain a love of your creative self.

Now if you can, please share and like this video linked above by visiting this link here and hitting share. I’d really appreciate it!