Always Have a Backup
About two weeks before my dissertation defense, I was headed out of town for the weekend. At the last minute, I decided to make a quick backup of my dissertation documents to a flash drive as a tertiary backup. I already had a time machine backup, as well as a Dropbox backup. Sure enough, my laptop blew out on that trip and I lost all my files.
No worries I thought, I have three backups that are current. After replacing my hard drive and reinstalling the MacOS, I went to recover from my time machine backup, and somehow the previous eight months of backups had been corrupted.
I was able to restore my machine but lost all my files (including photos, music, and dissertation documents) as of eight months ago. Okay, don’t panic. I have Dropbox.
I logged in, started downloading synced files, but to my surprise, the one folder where I kept my actual dissertation in, had not synced properly. Thankfully, I still had all of my dissertation work files and research files. I had no current copy of my actual FULL dissertation except for a two-month-old copy in my email outbox that I had sent to my advisor.
I thought of all those hours of writing… All those sleepless nights… All that time drafting figures… All the headaches and lost time… All for nothing. I was so monumentally screwed. The two months before a dissertation is generally when the largest block of writing takes place. But then I remembered my flash drive.
That flash drive saved my butt. I only ended up losing a few documents in the end. Grad students, always make at least three backups of your dissertation.
Story credit: Reddit / lakewoodhiker