Just this week I had a scare when I thought I had erased an entire folder of unpublished articles. Fortunately I had only moved the folder, although I have no idea how that happened. No matter, files saved! Only later did I realize that the entire folder had been automagically backed up anyway.
Actually, the purpose of this newsletter is a senior writer's walk down memory lane, to 1977-78. I figure if nothing else it'll give you a perspective of what writing entailed in that geological epoch.
The Backstory
I was a doctoral student at the time, in the midst of writing my dissertation. That also required boxes of punch cards that contained my research data and had to be run through various software on a University mainframe. No PCs then, no data crunching software in The Cloud.
Never mind the hassle of carting those boxes around campus, literally in a cart. What really gave all of my cohorts sleepless nights and constant anxiety was the horror of a fire burning up our dissertations.
You see, in those days everything had to be typed by hand, then given to our advisors to read and comment, re-worked, retyped, then handed over to a professional typist to semi-finalize to be sent out for wider review. If there was a typo on a page, the entire page had to be typed over, sometimes an entire section.
This happened section by section. When finally done, the entire manuscript had to be professionally typed for the exacting University requirements.
The Problem and Solution
But the problem was what to do with those punch cards and rough copy dissertations before they were finalized. There was no such thing as backups. There was only starting all over from scratch, or suicide.
The only choice open to us was preservation, not backup. The answer? Empty the freezer for six months, wrap the boxes and dissertation in plastic bags and re-stock the freezer with those gluten-free treats. Yeah, ancient tech, but it worked!
Note: Nowadays, I back up all my writing on iCloud, but I also have multiple hard drive backups for my writing (and photography).
Shalom Chabibi, wishing you and the ganse mishpacha ah freilichen Chanukah.