Lesson Learned About Backing Up

A week or so before I left I was working on these articles. I was actually writing three or four at one time and had several tabs open. Now I’m not sure what happened or what I did but boy did I make a hot mess of things. I hit save on three of the articles. At least I thought I did, what I actually did was revert them back to the template I was using and all of the articles were just gone.

Normally that wouldn’t be a problem but while I wasn’t paying attention I permanent deleted the trash and got rid of the saved changes in WordPress. Yep! A huge mistake if I do say so myself. I normally don’t create a backup of articles I am int he process of writing. I either write them directly into my WordPress editor or a write them in Word and then copy and paste. Once they are pasted and saved I delete them.

What a Mess!

I was so upset with myself, I mean I now had to go back and rewrite three articles. Find the links I was working with, notes or information I had, everything. I wanted to cry right then and there. Of course I didn’t but it was a close thing. I rewrote the articles and realized I needed ot make some changes.

I needed to draft my articles somewhere else and save that copy or I need to copy and paste the posted copy right away. After some thinking I decided I would write my articles (posts) in Google Docs and then copy and paste from there. That way I would have a copy of the post if i needed. I will save them for a couple of months before I archive or delete them. I haven’t decided which yet. My blog gets backed up every night so once an article is actually posted and y’all see it I can get a copy if I need to.

Another Lesson

I just can’t believe I didn’t pay closer attention. I kept going back and forth between the articles. I don’t know what happened but I felt like pulling my hair out after it was all said and done. Another lesson I learned was that I needed to concentrate on one article at a time. The three I was working on were giveaway hops so a lot of the parts were similar, like the Rafflecopter giveaway code, etc. However, I did go back through each one and make sure I put the correct code into each one. I was just attempting to them all set up so i didn’t have as much to do just before they started.

That will teach me. Nope from now on it is one article and one article only. I have also discovered that I work better when I have few distractions. So writing the articles in Google Docs and not having a dozen different tabs open means I get each article done much quicker. In fact, as I finish this particular article I have written twenty other ones int he last two hours. They aren’t yet edited but hey!