A TALE OF TWO ARCHIVES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

It was the best of archives, it was the worst of archives…
   Make copies of your work. I’ve made copies of copies of files. And accidental copies of those. Where does the madness end?

Great files have little files and more back-ups to byte ’em.
And little files have cloned folders and so ad infinitum.
And the great archives themselves, in turn, have branching files to go on,
While these again have duplicates of duplicates, and so on.

   (This has always been with me, but conjures up memories of a blog post going back nine years. Damned archiving.)
   To business. I stumbled into a folder and found a file that shouldn’t have been there. This is the hazard of dragging files and dropping them.
   You will occasionally drag the right prisoner to the wrong cell. Moving the file to the right digital jail, incarcerating that piece of information for eternity, was but the work of a moment. I fixed it.
   However, this set me to thinking. How many more files are in the wrong places? Is this number unknowable, unfathomable, and non-fixable? I dealt with a particular category of file. Okay. How many folders do I need to check, here? And how many sub-folders?
   Let’s swirl the stick in the stew and see what pops up unexpectedly…
   One folder with two sub-folders. Enthusiastically, I head off to the sub-folder. Loads of folders in the sub-folder. These are sub-sub-folders, now. And there are eight of those. But they all have sub-folders of their own, as I’d expect…
   And yet, even allowing for a fair degree of organisation…there are additional folders that sneaked in under cover of the electronic mist. On top of that, there are loose files scattered all over the shop. Well. Damn. My work proceeds into the realm of individual files, down around the Ninth Level o’ Hell…
   The result? I created more folders, temporary ones, on the desktop. Five of those, to contain the plague. There’s an entire folder that was utterly misplaced, buried in the archive, so that headed over to the desktop as well.
   Action. I shunted stray files from my archive into the five temporary folders. How many strays, in this vast ocean? The offenders were 28, 58, 1, 1, and 3. Not many misplaced files, after all. The truly wayward folder had five files in it. Very low numbers.
   The first two on the list are higher as they have whole categories to work off. And the rest are the result of isolated dragging-and-dropping mistakes. You’d expect, even in the best of organised offices, to have stray cats wandering the digital streets. So far, so normal…
   But another folder was made. In the land of Mordor Microsoft…
   What’s this, lingering in the archive? Not even a hundred stray files. All is well in shaded country lanes. And yet, here’s this wood that I can’t see for the trees. What the fuck is THE FALLEN ARCHIVE, and why the fuck would I create such a creature?
   This fallen archive is four years old, and sits in a folder that’s a back-up. Says so. Okay. But looking inside this mess, I see it’s a duplicate of many file folders with different categories and flavours of ice cream with all the toppings and…
   What.
   The.
   Actual.
   Fucketty-fuck.
   My best guess? This monstrosity is, itself, a temporary thing. I’d set it down as a place-holder while backing up loads of things. Added layer of security, just for a short while. The problem is that…I set it down in an obscure place. The wrong sub-folder. So I did all my archiving, and checked to make sure I’d swept the floor clean…
   But the duplicate fallen archive wasn’t on the floor, or even in that building. I’ve done periodic reviews to make sure I’d eliminated redundant duplicated efforts. Oh, I have no problem duplicating efforts – that’s the point of backing things up.
   Over time, though, you create an extra layer of duplication here, there. I’ve reviewed the files, scanned the landscape, and studied the folders like Gandalf on a fucking mission to answer riddles in the dark. Sure, I’ve found mini-archives that escaped my notice before…
   You dig deep. But yesterday upon the stair, I found an archive that wasn’t there when I conducted my deep dig. Yesterday, I accidentally journeyed to the centre of the archive. The fallen archive. Cast out of digital heaven, its wings scorched and torn off by the descent into electronic hell…
   What fresh level of fuckwittery is this? We’ll find the villain responsible and…oh. Right. Nothing to see here. Jog the fuck on. Except. There was a lot to see here. The fallen archive had two subfolders, damn it.
   Two horns on which to gore my tired flailing corpse. I was undead by this point. The red glare behind each eye, source of my necromantic power, came into the world fuelled by what was left of the last coffee I consumed before the arcane ritual took hold.
   I’m glaring at the folders now. In one, 3,572 files. And in the other, a mere 675 files. All loose. No sub-sub-sub-rub-a-dub-dub-flub-flub-glub-glub-sub-woofer-sub-tweeter-submarine-sub-folders. Over 4,000 duplicated files, risen as though Lost Atlantis resurfaced for a bit of a lark.
   Well that’s just fucking great. Warp nine, Mr Frodo.
   Nine GIG of space. I’m saddened that there aren’t any sub-folders in there. Fucking should be. Would make my life a hell of a lot easier. I can see whole fields of files grouped by similar theme. But there are no fences, separating those fields.
   I hope this is the largest unholy duplication on the machine. It feels like the lumpiest accumulation of over-duplicated data in the one forgotten space. How do I manage this mound of multiplicity? Delete? Oh, that’s too easy. This information has to be checked against the real archive before I delete a thing.
   And the real archive is also the back-up archive, stored on the external hard drive. It’s over on the external drive that I must do all my serious checking. Do these files exist on the spare machine? Yes. Why do they exist as a fallen archive? Guessing, now.
   I’m sure there is a reason. My main hope is that I never blogged openly about setting up a fallen archive, explaining that reason in public. Awkward. Let’s fire up the external device, and see what we can see…
   Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed…
   Unsurprisingly, when backing up the main archive…I backed up the fallen archive as well, right there on External Avenue. How to proceed from here? I’ll work my way through the fallen archive on the computer, checking against the main archive to see that every file in the fallen archive is definitely a duplicate based on information stored in all the right wrong places. Those fallen files can go.
   At the end, I believe the fallen archive will be empty as I murder pointless duplicates. Absurd notion, I know. If it isn’t empty, there’s more digging to do. And if I mess up, hey, the fallen archive is already there on the external drive anyway. I’m still safe. If I make a colossal mistake here, there’s stuff stored on the cloud as well.
   Time to dig deep into the digital dust. I’ll start with the smaller of the two photocopied archives. Fewer files to deal with. Maybe more difficult files to corral into the field. Putting fencing up as I type…
   Step one. Disconnect the external drive. No need to confuse the issue.
   Next. Go to the fallen archive, part two.
   Step three. Sigh.
   Next.
 

*

 

Of course there was a NEXT. Dim realisation shone upon my fevered brow, and I quickly switched over to the first part of the fallen archive. There, I secured large sections of duplicated material, and I deleted half the overall problem inside a minute. Around four GIG of stuff. I realised about half of what I’d done in setting the mess up in the first fucking place.
   Doing so well.
   But another another folder was made. In the land of Mordor Microsoft…
   Think of it as a desperate movie-pitch. Lord of the Rings 2: Revenge of the Sith. What if, right, hear me out, no, hear me out. This is it. Sauron had a twin brother: Zauron. And it’s Zauron who was the big eye guy at the end of the trilogy.
   So this is his ring, which is almost identical to Sauron’s. That means…Zauron was destroyed. But Sauron was unaffected by the loss of the twin ring. Zauron’s ring grants the power of immunity to flame. Including lava. Though, ironically, it couldn’t save itself. Never mind that bit. It’s borrowed from STAR WARS.
   Movie opens with Darth Vader climbing out of the volcano. Gollum, who fell into the volcano with Zauron’s ring – Mjollnir – has returned as Darth Vader. He jumps out, right, he jumps out of the lava a microsecond before Zauron’s ring dissolves in the lava.
   The ring writhes and transforms as it dies, turning into a hand and giving Gollum one final thumb of approval, before melting forever. Now, scarred beyond belief and wearing a primitive steam-powered life-support suit crafted by the Dwarf Alberich, Darth Gollum Vader must seek out new life, and new civilisations, and boldly Gollum where no Hobbit ever Hobbited before.
   He must find Sauron’s ring before Sauron does. Meanwhile, Sauron has been using his growing magical powers to transport his new body to Japan, where he receives a Mecha-upgrade and turns into a fifty-foot-tall Killer Death Robot with rocket launcher arms and an armour-plated greenhouse for a head.
   Darth Gollum Vader/The Batman then faces off against Sauron the Greenhouse Mecha-God in a best-of-three wrestling spectacular in the depths of Bank underground station in London. This is a railway station so deep that even Balrogs fear to tread the haunted ruins.
   I fear readers may suspect that I have moved away somewhat from the initial point.
   The point was…while wrestling with the fallen archive I noticed, out of the corner of my screen, another folder. CLEANUP. A temporary folder. Forgotten. Dusty. Forlorn. Musty. Forfuck’ssake. Rusty.
   And this fucker held sixteen GIG of shit, making the fallen archive look sleek and aerodynamically elegant by comparison. I believed, with the fever of a thousand stars, that I’d nailed this over-duplication down long ago.
   Also…as standard, one folder was empty. An easy fix, that gremlin.
   And a slightly more…annoying…fix? On the way to the end of this blog post, I stumbled over another another another folder. Duplicate Archive. At least I made that easy for myself. This blob ran away with two GIG of data. I blitzed it with a howitzer.
   Well fucketty-fuck-fuck-fuck, how wrong could I be? Just slightly wrong about everything. That’s far worse than being very wrong about one thing. Unless I’m wrong about that. Back to the data mines I go, 28 folders of doom ahead of me – sitting crooked, like tombstones, in a lost graveyard. File this mess under the hashtag #NOHASHTAG.

YOU CAN’T NEGOTIATE WITH A MESSY ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Days grow shorter until they grow longer. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the “shortest” day of the year will, invariably, be followed by a day with an extra minute of sunshine added to it…minus half an hour of daylight from a torrential downpour at 3.30 in what’s laughably referred to as the afternoon.   Why mention this? It’s the “shortest” day today, and that’s no good to me. Looks like the blog ate my homework. It’s been a busy month, and I’m only just getting around to blogging. In a little over a week, I must blog again.
   Yes, I’d have preferred to blog on the 1^st of the month. But, in the wink of a blink, it is now the shortest day. There’s glorious artificiality in creating a yearly archive. Soon I’ll have to copy those dusty template files over into next year’s farm-fresh folders. Always feels false. Like doing taxes.
   Never falsify your taxes when you can fake someone else’s.
   Plastic cheese levels of artificiality abound, when it comes to archives. But for the sake of convenience, we divide sizeable chunks of time into years. Winter weather eerily tells me it is winter. In Scotland, that sensation can occur in June. December tells me, with long frosts and short days, that I must carve a new statue from a block of marble…and call that statue the next year’s archive.
   What of the main archive, though? The collection of files, year to year? How messy is that? There’s an area of the data factory that is the messiest. It is the part of the whole collection that is the hardest to deal with…though it contains the fewest files.
   And that part is on the dreaded desktop.
   I leave files there for convenience in handy folders with temporary names. TEMPORARY, TEMP, TEMP 1, TEMP 2, BODY DUMP LOCATIONS, RESERVE COFFEE VAULT GRID REFERENCE, etc. It’s my duty in life to ensure that they are all temporary files. And that they don’t contain much.
   But…by fuck…getting rid of them is hard. They are joined by more files. At one end, the folders are deleted or join the main archive stream. At the other end, random stuff wanders in and clogs up the system. These items penguin-walk across the screen.
   Let us be clear. The “system” is a clean desktop. Free of file folders. I allow links to pesky services: shortcuts to the recycle bin, media playing apps, this bit of software, that control panel, and so on. Links are useful.
   Folders, while handy, aren’t a permanent part of the system. They are tiny fish who come in and make themselves useful to the shark by cleaning things up. But then I have to clean up the stuff that was cleaned up.
   If I create a folder in the archive itself, away from the desktop, for this purpose of housing temporary things, then I create a folder that is in a drawer. Unseen. Easy to forget. Letting files slip onto the desktop is my way of having an alarm system in my face.
   Information builds up. I don’t quite know where to archive it just yet. Or I must work on it for a bit, and then archive. Time-specific items sit on the desktop for a day or until a particular date. Come the appointed hour, I sweep the area as clean as I can.
   Well, the big hour approaches. I must always have an empty desktop in December. At some point in the last two weeks of December, preferably. Definitely in the last week. Always. This is a lie…sometimes the quick level of change required from December into January isn’t as quick as I’d like.
   Hell, I’m still eating Christmas treats in January and cooking tinned food from December in March at the latest. Files don’t need to be updated by the stroke of midnight as the 31^st of December steps out into the night.
   I foolishly decided to research the shelf-life of tinned goods. There’ll be supermarket data, I said to myself. Not reams of articles in preparing your bunker for the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse™.
   It’s fine to eat cans left over from December in the far-off realm of March.
   What’s the state of play right now? There are 67 items on the desktop. Files or folders. I’m not counting shortcuts. One of these is the file I am typing into and another is the file marked backup that auto-generated when I saved my work.
   We’ll drop that to 65. Let me just take a load of images away and file them where they need to go. Or delete, as applicable…
   A good (indifferent) 90 minutes, and here I am. There’s one item left – this file. And there’ll be a copy of it as soon as I save. There. That leaves 26 links. I zapped a few of those shortcuts, as well.
   Oh. And one curious folder that has no properties but isn’t quite a shortcut. Things are tricky in the world of archiving. You can’t negotiate with a messy archive. I suspect you can’t really negotiate with a tidy one, either. There’s less room for manoeuvre, there.
   Can I now copy the archive for safety reasons? I should be able to. Copying never copies the stuff on the desktop. And so. That’s why I clear the decks. Stow loose cannons. Shiver some timbers. Scunge the lungeons. Make ready for sail, abaft the Braithwaites…

 

*

 

Somewhere along the way, the sun set on the shortest day of the year. Not as early as it did earlier in the month during ALL THE RAIN IN FIVE MINUTES, but rain has that effect on the light sensors.
   I also found time to make a brief trip into the woods, and, importantly, managed to come back again. Things stand in the way of blogging. Another day may pass before I publish this blog. So how did I do, in sweeping the digital dust off my electronic desktop?
   A few things had to be swept under the carpet. I moved them to next year’s archive using a spot of time travel, a flux capacitor, and a cup of coffee. Yes, I like the annual archive to be tidied promptly. Sometimes I really jump the gun in setting the next year’s archive up, though. I may be late with blogging, but I am now a bit early for next year.

 

*

 

Up before the dawn, I resolved to publish this blog today. How fares the desktop? I’d added three more files there overnight. Easy to move to the “right” locations. So we’re more or less in the clear again, right?
   The image in this blog is from the Tomb of Dracula. (Pencils by Gene Colan, and inks by Tom Palmer. Colan did a few comics direct from the pencils. No one inked Colan the way Tom Palmer did. And that...is a Comic Book Fact™. Palmer died back in August. He was 81.)
   A copy of it sat on the desktop, but I’ve moved it to a file inside the archive. And a copy of the illustration has the starring role of BEING the desktop itself. That’s the background. You’ll never see the desktop that clean.
   This morning, the desktop is almost empty. On the blank space to the left, I keep all the shortcuts. The blank space to the right is reserved for temporary file and folder placement. As it is harder to see things on the central image itself, I try to keep the desktop as clear as possible.
   That’s my traffic management system. As the files penguin-walk their way across the wasteland, they bunch up against the image…and then I have to do a spot of cleaning. I recommend this visual approach to people with cluttered desktops.
   Put an image on the screen centrally. Keep shortcuts on one side and the random stuff on the other. Never the twain shall meet, and good luck to you with that.
   Right now, the desktop contains this file. It’s here as a reminder that it is here. I work on it. Return to it. I am alarmed that it is on the desktop. There’s the copy, saved on the desktop. And, while I am in here, there are several phantom copies as literal temporary files – with the extension .tmp. Those vanish when I save and close the file.
   What’s left? Finish writing. Save the work. Transfer it to the blog. Publish. Archive the entry. Stare at a clean desktop. Start saving everything, all over again. Some of it to the cloud. And all of it to a portable hard drive. There are two of those hard drives. Copies of copies. I can snatch one from the shelf if I must evacuate…
   But if there isn’t time, and there isn’t, I’ll rely on the essential material that’s saved to the cloud, to rebuild after a fire. I have no personal copy of myself in the event of a fire, so, as usual, I have sixty seconds to be outside once the alarm goes. If I have a hard drive with me, fair enough. And if I haven’t, there’s the cloud. Also, if I must, I will reconstruct things from memory. Let’s hope, if it comes to it, that I improve on whatever I rebuild.
   And now, with one mighty sweep of a digital hand…mouse…the desktop is free…

FILE MANAGEMENT IN SPRING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Spring sprang.
   I look at my archive on a regular basis. The archive doesn’t wait for the masked ball to begin. Spring signals a change in the weather. It is an alarm clock that serves as a reminder that I can check my archive whenever I please. Speaking of which…
   Every single time I decide to tale a long hard look at my archive…
   I think I’ve dealt with duplication of effort. The two items go together so well. I’ll look at my archive. Duplication? I dealt with that already. Right? Wrong. No, no. I am right. Think about the components in this recipe for disaster.
   Copies of copies of files. Weeded. Duplicate folders. Thinned. Clones of directories. Murdered in the dark. Excess excessery. Excised.
   But…
   No.
   Here I am again again, taking the world’s biggest flamethrower to it all. Just like a heist merchant going after one last job, this is for the last time. And. Just for once. This time it’s real/personal/revenge. But this time, things are different, as I go in armed with a flamethrower in each hand. How do I tackle the eternal problem?
   I stare at duplicate files, not realising that they are duplicate files.
   In terms of paper files and folders, I’m staring at someone else’s conspiracy. I glare at boxes of time-wrinkled folders with sheets of paper in each folder and more sheets of paper lying loose on the floor.
   The loose leaves are, in the end, duplicates of the sheets tidied away inside folders within boxes packed in stacks across five rooms in two buildings. Red threads connect the dots.
   That would be the paper equivalent. And the world is a happier place in that equivalent setting. Meanwhile, back on a real planet near you…
   The digital reality is nowhere near as tidy as that mess. I go looking for my own published works. How hard is that? In each case, I head to a folder. The tales are all corralled there. Except that they aren’t. Not even remotely.
   In two cases, I am forced to go looking in an area of the archive that is through a very creaky door and along an unloved hallway daubed in flaking green paint. The kind of paint you see in run-down hospitals. Folders are along that hall, somewhere. Not true. Folders are down that hall. Everywhere. At each junction. Spilling from every cupboard.
   I went checking for the stuff I truly needed to check. And I discovered the ruins of all the files that I squeezed dry to create the stuff I needed. My recipe is nailed loosely to a wall. And empty packets of ingredients lie scattered down three corridors. Those are all files and folders, too.
   Somewhere in there, I’ve pinned the latest files, the important files, to a board made from cork. And I’ve taken that vital bulletin device and slid it into the back of a cupboard somewhere in this or another universe.
   Investigation is virtually endless. But, yes, it comes to an end. I was updating all the vital files. That’s what led to this blog post. Electronic books containing hyperlinks leading out of each book and onto the interwebs…those books must be maintained.
   Oh, they must.
   If you have to update your fiction book, the thing you are most likely to update is the dreaded hyperlink to someone/something/somewhere else. For want of a file the update was lost. And for want of the update the hyperlink was stale. For want of the hyperlink the reader was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
   Or something like that.
   Non-fiction works definitely require far more regular tending and weeding, especially of links, than do their fictional counterparts. I admit that the moon turns blue before I go into the tedious business of checking books for hyperlink issues. But these books are fiction. Factual works need regular watering, permits, X-Rays, complex tests, and planning permission applied for long after the fact.
   Managing hyperlinks. Let me count the ways.
   I found, for example, that one creator’s two separate links had somehow merged into links that went to the same internet page. This was clearly not the case when I plugged the artist’s work initially. I pruned his links with the snippety-snip of the digital shears, and all was well once more. Well. Until next the moon turns blue.
   This is not on the same level as refreshing the tree of liberty from time to time.
   The upshot, though, was noticing – really noticing – even more duplication of effort that I thought I’d rid myself of the last time I thought I’d rid myself of the time before that…
   And so on, to the horizon and beyond.
   What was the problem area I’d missed? Oh, just a whole slice of circles within spirals and wheels within wheels. Endless filing is endless. At least, with paper, you know you’ve reached the point at which the door into the room won’t open/close – delete as applicable.
   The danger with digital files, even the wordy ones, is that you’ll never fill the storage device to capacity. Text files confirm that talk is cheap – at least in terms of the amount of space taken up. Photos and videos. Those are horses of a wildly different colour.
   I will now change some file folder names to protect the indifferent.
   My problem lay in the CHOCOLATE folder. That sat in a sub-folder marked AMBROSIA. Also in the AMBROSIA folder was a sub-folder marked EARTH. Digging deep into CHOCOLATE, I discovered a sub-folder marked MISCELLANEOUS PASTA. In that sub-folder, I found a sub-folder labelled AMBROSIA 1 and another called AMBROSIA 2.
   All of these folders held files. The chocolate files. Ambrosia files. Earth files. Digging into the AMBROSIA 1 folder, I discovered the chocolate files all over again. So the chocolate files were in the CHOCOLATE folder where you’d expect them to be, but an accidental copy of those files sat in a sub-folder within a pocket universe.
   This was just the start of the beginning of the opening of the first bit of the tip of a very large iceberg. I repeated the crazy paving pattern at the front of my digital house as well as at the back. Copies of things should sit in other folders, not in sub-folders within the main folder.
   CHOCOLATE folder can have a CHOCOLATE folder copy sitting next to it in the main ARCHIVE folder. But CHOCOLATE folder shouldn’t have a copy of CHOCOLATE folder deeper inside the CHOCOLATE folder with a further copy of CHOCOLATE folder even deeper inside the copy of a copy.
   High levels of fractal energy there. Frac that bullshit.
   This is what I’d missed the last time, somehow. And all the times before, I guess. I had book files listed in folders by year. Each year, the old book folders stayed untouched. I copied them over to the new folder for the new year, and added to the new folder over the course of that year.
   Things are more complex than that over time, and quirks develop in any system. I decided I only needed all of the book files once. So I checked each yearly entry for quirks. For files that only appeared in one year and not the year before or after.
   Just double-triple-checking. The usual.
   Gradually, I reduced the book folder’s level of duplication to near-zero. Individual projects all have their own blank file I can write in. Very small handy level of duplication.
   The entire folder is duplicated in cloud storage and in at least two portable hard drives. But on the computer itself, there is one folder to rule them all. It is most precious to me.
   Taking a detour into checking hyperlinks of published books, I realised that more than mere quirks still existed in the system. Then I discovered this nesting Russian doll problem. Folder 1 contains files and also folder 2. Folder 2 contains different files, but also a folder you’ll find in folder 1. What do you do about this?
   Fire up the flamethrower.
   Open folders in different windows. Compare files. Check for names. Then for size of each file. Date of last alteration. If there is doubt, open the duplicate files together and check every page on both files. Then make a decision about what you are keeping and what you are deleting. You will be deleting.
   Later, this will have a knock-on effect on how much data you are storing on the cloud and on any physical storage devices. If I slim down the duplication, I want that slimmed down on the emergency copies elsewhere.
   As far as I know, I’ve never lost data. Never shredded a document by mistake. Haven’t deleted a file or a folder that I was meant to keep. I may be a bit shaky on the generation and storage of duplicate files as time flows by...
   But I am on far sturdier ground when it comes to quintuple-triple-double-triple checking the deleting or shredding of material.
   People have lost data about me. But that is another story.

WHAT THE HELL IS THE ARCHIVE, ANYWAY? A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

At the start of each year I attempt to put my archive in order. We’ll define the start of each year as The Entirety of January. I put my archive in order at other points throughout the year, but this business in January seems more final.
   It’s not quite the start of something. Rather, it’s about putting the previous year’s archive to bed. Except, of course, I am sitting here asking myself…just exactly what the hell is the archive, anyway? It’s this bit of information, and that file, and those things over there behind the low clouds. Don’t forget the entire landscape ahead.
   The archive isn’t exactly annual. But there are annual features to it. The archive isn’t entirely electronic. There’s paper aplenty in this so-called paperless office. I only have to glare at the stockpile of ink boxes for the printer to understand that.
   My paper archive is, for the most part, organised and not chaotic. (It is chaotic.) Regular correspondence is arranged in boxes by individual. Years of correspondence in the one place. Letters. Cards. Oddments. Official correspondence is saved up in boxes, too.
   The official material is a collection of fossils. Paperwork. You need it. Don’t think you don’t. There’ll be a query half a decade down the line, and you’ll be thankful that you held on (by your fingernails) to the piece of paper that saves your clichéd bacon.
   Offers to “go paperless” are treated with suspicion. Certain government departments insist on paper, to this day. And I’m thankful that I can, on occasion, wave an original document in the stern faces of those who disbelieve they’ve made an error at their end.
   I make very little effort to put my paper archive in order each year. There’s not much paper coming in. What arrives is vital. It is stored in the time-honoured fashion. The system works. In some cases, evidence is corroborated by the existence of electronic documents.
   There’s the business of shredding. Certain documents don’t outlive the hour in which they flop through my letterbox. Others are kept for years. There is a clearout once in a blue moon. I am very careful about the things I shred. So far, I’ve not shredded the wrong document. Keep your shredder in a separate room from the office housing the paperwork.
   My shredder is on a separate floor. I have to make the pilgrimage to mince a document.
   Inside the electronic archive, I store all sorts of nonsense. I tend to store things by the year. Though there are items outwith annual storage. Pillars of the Ancients, that stand separate from the Great Library of Electronica, mark eternity unchanged by the sands of time.
   What am I talking about? I mean the files that let me set up the annual archiving process in the first place. There’s a folder on monthly entries with sub-folders marking out the months of the year. Every January, I create my new annual archive based on that monthly folder.
   It sits outside the annual scheme of things, but it serves as the backbone for so many annual categories. People come and go. I create a folder for people every year, and I build entries based on whoever turns up in the correspondence.
   The moment someone contacts me over business or personal stuff, that person receives a named folder. I’ll drop the monthly folder into that archive entry. Then I can check to see who said what and roughly when, going by so-and-so in the people folder for the year blah-de-blah. That person contacted me in January. The other person conducted business with me in March and April.
   Seeing to my archive every January isn’t about finality. No, there’s the fresh annual archive to set up. There are other organisational files sitting there, waiting to go. Construction of a new wing of the Great Library of Electronica is swift.
   All the basics are up and running in January. Yes, it took time to set up the system I use now. That’s why it takes hardly any time to create a new annual framework on or around the 1^st of January. Yes, occasionally I jump the gun and create next year’s files ahead of time. Depends how busy things get, as one year makes way for another.
   Construction of the new is easy. Preservation of the old should also be easy. Quick. Think not these thoughts. They’ll do you no good. I have copies of copies. And that can be a problem. Duplication of effort.
   But is the duplicate an exact duplicate? The paper archive is smaller, and, though tedious to explore, is easy enough to explore. Electronic folders multiply in the dark, mushrooming, and their purpose is to deceive.
   Yes, I really must take a digital flamethrower to the electronic side of things. What is important? Where are the relevant files? What became more important? Is anything redundant? Are certain files no longer usable? What arcane sorcery must I perform, just to be able to open and read an old piece of data? How many files fell to corruption without notice?
   And I speak only of the computer.
   The archive’s tendrils extend into e-mail and more. Every tendril is a burst of energy provided by coffee while I typed on a rainy night. Paperwork. Computer data. Internet files. Miniature space-time maps of me, and of organisations interacting with me. People. Places. Things. This glitch. That gremlin.
   Errors corrected and terrors deflected. Hilarious things that can never be explained as funny. Not only did you have to be there, but also…you had to be there for those seven minutes. What is the archive?
   It’s me. And not me. Hell, it’s my biting response to spam e-mail in a mock-rant on The Twitter. My archive is a portrait of the interwebs. The information super-country-lane. And that stack of paper in the room across the way. Also, the stack out of sight behind the first stack.
   I reorganised everything. And now another year trundles in. I must reorganise all over again. The archive is also my copy of the archive. At least, in electronic terms. So it is that dark plasticky box, storing information in reserve. An external drive.
   And there’s cloud storage on the interwebs as well.
   Don’t forget my reserve computer. If this one fails, I have a very slow emergency machine to lean on. It’s similar to flying on no engines and a hefty dollop of wishful thinking dished out in a slow treacly manner.
   But what is the archive, really?
   Preparing to set down another layer of it, to handle the next year’s files, I can say – with no fear – that the archive is a steaming disorganised mess. Just the annual tax files alone. My flamethrower is hissing and sparking at the ready.
   Every year, I think I fix this as I put an archive layer to bed. And every year I go out of my way to stir the spaghetti into deep unsolvable tangles. By the time I post this blog, I’ll have finally deleted stuff that’s no longer required. (Dream on.)
   I believe much of that was never required in the first place. Do I revisit the archive? Can I make use of those files of old? Yes. That’s the point of the archive, after all. To make use of stuff that’s sitting there waiting for the call.
   Yes, I’ve faced the accusation that I am organised. But my own better organisation gets in the way of my own disastrous organisation, giving the mere illusion of a tidy office. Beneath the surface, there isn’t even a concept of anything being beneath the surface.
   And so…
   This time, I really look at the paper archive. As there’s not much lying around, this should truly be easy to navigate. Except, with a slow dawning sense of ultimate terror, I realise I am once again talking utter bullshit about my archives.
   The official files in see-through plastic boxes are (more or less) okay. Yes, they are in a bit of a jumble. But that jumble is self-contained. There’s a plastic vault holding the forces of chaos at bay.
   However, there’s another category…
   Once upon a time, long ago and far away, over seven hills and seven woods and seven streams, in the land of fucking make-believe, I stored stacks of paperwork on shelves. This was a straightforward system, before the days of see-through boxes.
   I should’ve gone directly to see-through boxes.
   This year, more space is given over to books and to boxes of boardgames and roleplaying game supplements for the video channel. What can I cut? Time to weed out useless pieces of paper in the stacks.
   Why did I never transfer the stacks to see-through boxes? The stacks are less official. Doesn’t make them less important. If I must locate an official document, I head to my see-through boxes.
   So what happened in January this year? That pressure, to investigate small inconsequential stacks, headed into the red zone of the steam dial. And I was aghast. Shocked. Dismayed. Lots of words like those.
   Small stacks of paper. They are hellish to go through. Hellish, only more so. Densely-packed fossil records glare back at me. I’ve allowed this stuff to grow disorganised in a peaceful manner.
   Back to the coal-face it is. I chip away at the layers, knowing that each small separate stack will consume hours (if not days) of my life. My archive seems organised. Yes. It seems so. Seeming is believing. I disbelieve that. This is death by a thousand paper-cuts.
   The good news is…that I only have to tackle this paper archive once. I have yet to shred the wrong document. It’s also true to say that I have yet to shred a load of right documents that have had this coming to them for a very long time.
   Nurse, the smelling-salts. And a large coffee.

THE ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Files generate filing. So do I have a filing cabinet?
   My archive is digital.
   But there’s another archive. Made up of papers, scraps, notes, articles. This is the original archive. It exists across rooms, across time, across space, across offices. In some ways, the paper archive represents all the office layouts I’ve ever had.
   Data. Information. Scraps. The paper archive is where ideas go to die. I write story ideas down on paper and file them on my desktop. That is the top of a real desk. I suppose it’s a memory cache, of sorts.
   Gradually I type the written notes up, and they enter the Matrix. What happens to the paper notes after that? They are checked – both sides of the paper – and then they are shredded. To be sure I’ve checked them, I scribble along the used notes in circles – line by line. Any plain text left over is dealt with right there and then or at another time, depending on the nature of the information.
   I may have to stand up and leave the office to head to my library for further research. Not all research takes place online. I’ll return, coffee to hand, with the coffee well-isolated from the electricals, and complete my research by scrawling yet another note. And when that note is finally transferred to the digital archive, I scribble more circles on the paper. Then, inevitably, it’s off to the shredder we go, down in the kitchen.
   Keep your shredder away from the room in which you store documents. That’s an added safeguard against shredding the wrong thing. I’ve yet to shred the wrong thing. Quite rightly, I once shredded an entire novel.
   But wait a bit, you cry.
   If you cache your paper archive on your actual wooden desktop, and then deal with notes line by scribbled line, there can’t be a paper archive beyond the small stack of sheets on your desk. Ah. How quaint a notion that is.
   My paper archive isn’t just about story notes. There’s correspondence. I’m a writer, damn it, and I still send letters to people. Hell, people even reply.
   And there’s official correspondence. I once talked my way out of a computerised tax-dispute simply by turning up armed with paperwork dating back years. (They were having none of it over the phone.) Admittedly, incoming government paperwork is on the decline. But there’s enough of it around to keep handy in the event of a horrendous mistake.
   Miscellaneous stuff. Yes, there’s all that. Of course there is. I have a file category for that in the digital archive. Let’s just say the paper equivalent is far less tidy. But I see that I didn’t answer a question.
   Do I have a filing cabinet?
   A small one. I dimly recall clearing it out in recent years. The problem with clutter is that it’s so cluttered. The time has come to sift through the piles of paperwork and shred the absolute fucking shit out of anything that is useless.
   Blunt? Let me tell you how I really feel. This miscellaneous pile of bullshit becomes a miscellaneous pile of bullshit with time. I can’t throw it out, in case the paperwork is still useful. Time must pass. It’s the only cure for the huge stack of paperwork. Wait for as much of it as possible to grow obsolete, and then pounce.
   The shredder stands by, silent, obedient, waiting for the moment. The cull. A call to arms. I think it’s high-time since the last time. The problem is…sifting through the paper stacks takes a miniature eternity.
   And the solution…goes for recycling. Bulky stacks of paper disappear. Space is reclaimed. And I am all for recycling the limited space I have. This provides more room for books. Books, technically, have an archive all to themselves. My library.
   As I type, my library is split across four rooms and a cupboard. This is the best of a bad situation. A small library encloses my office. I type from a book-lined alcove. It is by far the best office layout I’ve ever had.
   Not perfect, it’s true. But damn close.
   And the main library lives across the hall. I am only reorganising my bookshelves in the sense that a few cubbyholes are taken up by stacks of paper. Those are in need of serious fixing. I’ve yet to shred the wrong thing.
   Oh, I was right to shred an entire novel. I kept the good bit in my files. There are working prints of my stories. I like to read those physically once I’m done writing. Typos that evade electronic spellchecking do exist. They seem easier to spot on paper.
   To the handy piece of advice from C.S. Lewis about reading your work aloud, I must add emphasis in this digital world to another obvious requirement – read your work in print. Once I’m done fixing the fixable, I dispense with the working print. I’m not precious about that. It takes up too much space.
   I’m in a mood to remove clutter. Yes, I keep lines of books in front of lines of books on deep bookshelves. What of it? Yes, I keep far too much paperwork in my so-called paperless office. It’s not that I want to hang onto this stuff. I really don’t. Sometimes you need it.
   The Digital Age dispensed with that absurdity of the Stone Age – the original manuscript. I don’t write stories out in full. Just notes. If you write in longhand to solidify the main story idea, that’s fine. Get it down. Fix it on the page. Build on that foundation.
   How many of my original handwritten stories are still around the place? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’ve been told that I write like a spider going backwards on acid – in terms of my actual scribble as well as the content. Whether related to handwriting or to the ideas conveyed by the handwriting, the notion of an LSD-dosed spider dipped in ink set loose upon the world…
   Yes, the notion covers what I do, quite nicely.
   I face hours, nay, days of work in setting out the paper archive for demolition. What will stay? Should everything go? Is there anything written down that hasn’t been transferred across to the digital realm?
   My knowledge of the archive is patchy. I can think of, perhaps, two items that are missing in action. Again, I resist the temptation to rely upon my faulty memory. Though, it was recently drawn to my attention that I once reconstructed a bundle of misplaced story notes from memory…
   When I found the original notes, I realised that I carry too many story ideas in my head. I fix them there. It’s my very own very personal very portable brain archive. This is the problem with being a writer. So many story worlds die with you, if you don’t write them down. Not enough time.
   Fixing things firmly in my mind, I was shocked to discover the fixing was so damned useful. Repeating stories in my head, over and over, improved the cohesiveness across time. The missing story notes were so similar to the reconstructed notes that I was better off relying on the reconstructed ones. At least they were typed up.
   I was then told…
   Y’know, people generally don’t do that.
   It is a failing. Writers carry ideas around in the head. I carry them around for far too long. Instead, I should be like the writers who scribble everything down all the time. No need for a paper archive, then.
   Would my archive become paperless as a result of this change?
   Bless your hearts for thinking so. I still have a printer, and a large stack of ink cartridge bullets to fire from the printing gun. Damn it, I am that most digital of writers – the kind of scribbler who will always run a papery office.
   I’d love to go paperless. But reality intrudes, even this far into the Digital Age. I’ll go a wee bit mair paperless, aye, it’s true, for I’ll be shredding. Not entirely sure what I’ll be shredding or how far back it all goes.
   Blasts from the past. How much of the fossil pile will remain relevant? I am heartless when it comes to the removal of once-important items. And I say that staring at a pile of nonsense sitting on my desktop right now. I’ll be sweeping that downstairs in the next few minutes.
   For once, this archival talk turns to paper, to shredding, to recycling. There’s a reckoning to be had over on the digital side of things, it’s true. But that clutter merely clogs up a hard drive. It’s rooms I’m clearing out, this time around.
   Rooms. Memories. The memories of the arrangement of sheets of paper in clusters, as well as the memories in those piles, are all about to be cleaned up. Slowly. I wish I could just take the lot to a bonfire. But I might throw away one treasure in a stack of dross. And we can’t have that.
   It’s possible to recover a deleted computer file. Not so easy with the paper sheets falling from stout bookshelves as though they are yellowing leaves falling from the trees outside. Shocker. I’m in an autumnal mood in autumn, and it’s time for some sweeping.

THE OLD ARCHIVE GAME :A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

It's the first day of a new year, and the archive is four hours from being updated on the cloud.
   That archive is already here on this computer. It's on that external hard drive. I may copy the archive over to yonder dusty laptop lurking behind the main computer.
   Earlier, smaller, archived years sit safe in a fire-resistant safe.
   My published works are all archived on Amazon, where they are for sale.

*

Yes, the best form of archiving for an author is still PUBLICATION.

*

Lessons learned in previous years allowed me to archive with ease this year. No mess, very little fuss, and hardly any blood on the carpet.
   The only problem is...the next archive. Starting afresh, and dropping all the new folders into another new folder. I prepared for that task long ago...
   It's a paste job.
   And yet...each year brings change. Old familiar folders for regular contacts just curl up and flake away in the wind when companies go out of business, say.
   Contacts ebb and flow. A few folders go up automatically. Those people will get to me sooner or later. Some contacts fall into the sketchier category, though.
   May turn up.
   No need to create a folder until that happens. Mentally, you replay a scene from Amélie. This is right at the start of the movie...
   There, in an apartment on the Avenue Trudaine, we see a sad man erase an address from his book of friends. Death creates gaps, of course. But other events take people out of the archives.

*

In ancient times, I'd spend the first day of the year archiving.
   Then things grew more complicated, and I'd check more thoroughly. Days passed. A week went by. I wondered if I'd have the previous year's archive in a fit state come the end of January.
   It isn't about losing data. No. The problem is accidental duplication of data. With slight variation following, to add to the fun. Luckily, I keep that to a minimum now.
   As far as I know.

*

Another year, and another archive put to bed. With large chunks of the archive transferred to the new year's fresh folder, the job is marked off.

   Save your files. And try to avoid mismanagement of those saved files. Write stories. Publish them. Data is robust. And data is fragile. Discuss all you like. But save the discussion in several different places.

THE ARCHIVE GAME: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

It's that time of the year again. Put the whole year's archive to bed, instead of keeping it in bits.
   What does that mean? Everything is backed the fuck up - for all time. Or until the rise of the Skynet computer replaces the human race with overly-muscled Austrian-accented killing machines.

*

Putting the whole archive to bed isn't about backing everything up. (It is. Not JUST that, though.) Archive bedtime is about making sure all the material I backed up is...well, at the very worst...semi-organised.

   Unfortunately, I'm Jack Lemmon. Watch The China Syndrome. Jack talks about defence.
   In depth.
   This is the second time I've mentioned that in a blog post. See what I did, there? If you haven't read the earlier post, it's okay. You caught on to the idea here.
   Your back-up system has a back-up system, and so on.

*

It's important for authors (and others) to save their work. The best form of backing a story up is still publication.

*

What changed, this time around? I shuffled the deck before I dealt new cards in the archive game.

   The emergency reserve laptop was still the machine of record as far as the archive went. Content grew there. I copied that content over to the internet-linked computer via an external hard drive.

   And files crawled from there to cloud storage. Two computers. One external drive. The cloud. And the odd USB memory stick, for core files.

   Time passes. Data requirements balloon. The smaller computer is no longer the best place to run the digital archive from. Every year, the process shifts and changes.

   This year, most of the over-duplication problem was dealt with when I converted  to the latest version of Windows. I always create too many copies of vital files...

   Well, that's better than the alternative. Two folders, with different names, housing the same effing files? Well. Damn.

   Annual archiving, putting the whole thing to bed, involves killing off screeds of duplicate files - without killing off the WRONG files.

   I put that crap in order when I jumped to the new operating system in 2015. So this January's final final check was not-so-secretly prepared way back in misty September.
   And this brand new year, my double-check of a double-check of a double-check spotted...
   Two rogue files.
   An hour spent scouring folders, and I nailed the problem. Problem solved. As I type, I am halfway through loading the most recent update onto the cloud, replacing the earlier cloudy version.

*

Always review how you archive things. Change for the sake of change is nothing special. But change dealing with a shifting tech situation beyond your control...at least you can dive in and have some input on what happens next.

*

So. This year's lesson, at the last moment, is that I had a tail computer and a dog computer. Switching those labels around made more sense.

*

On a separate point...

   I'm about to have coffee. Though that sustains me, it is unlikely to send me soaring back to the giddy heights of weekly blogging. I'll continue to blog monthly, if I can.

   Too soon to say, in cold grey January. But. I hope to have something worth blogging about in dreary February.

*

Back up your work. Enjoy writing. Drink coffee. I think that about covers it. Except for all the other things I left out.

REALLY ARCHIVING THIS TIME: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There was a Windows 8? Fuckin'ell.

*

I jest. Who else jested? The people who came up with Windows 8.

*

Windows 7 was the pass-key to Windows 10.
   In the end, upgrading an operating system took just under an hour. It was pain-free. I had more aggravation the last time I went to the dentist. And that was nothing much to speak of, either.

*

But putting my archives in order first...

*

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

*

In winter's depths, I create the final annual archive. There's a lot of saving and copying that goes on across the year. But there's a final archive set in cement and dropped off a rum-running boat into the river of time.
   ONE FOLDER TO RULE THEM ALL.
   This year, I prepared that final archive early. And in winter's depths I'll create the year's final final archive.
   Fuck.
   I went through the year-thus-far's files and consolidated a whole bunch of folders. Even though I improve archiving yearly, I still end up with too many duplicate files.
   Not talking about copies stored in other locations for safety. I mean within the archive itself.
   But this time, with the threat of a dead operating system ahead of me, I really truly archived. Sure, I make sure. But I had to be certain that I was sure of being sure. And doubly-sure of that.

*

The time-limit on upgrading to Windows 10 was a year. There was another time-limit. Today. A free security deal runs out today. So I might as well upgrade the whole system today and have a new tomorrow to look forward to, er, tomorrow.
   I ditched around 20,000 needlessly-duplicated files in the end. That's 20,000 FILES UNDER THE SEAS. 
   Do I care about all the fun new things a new operating system can do for me? Of course not. I want the fucker to allow me to do all the old things. That's the important part.
   Can I open a file to write in? Yes. Can I write in that file? Yes. Can I save that file? Yes. Can I print or otherwise share that file if I want to? Yes. Job fucking done.

*

But the real job here is to have copies of your files. Always have them. Know how to secure them. Keep them safe. Hope you can retrieve them. If not, go to the copies of copies you made.
   In truth, there's no such thing as a needlessly-copied file. Create data. Don't lose it.

*

And what's the one thing you should all be grateful for?

   This...

   Microsoft is not a Scottish company. If it were, all your voice-recognition software would be attuned to Caledonian accents. And you'd be right royally fucked.

*

Keep writing, folks. And keep saving and copying and securing what you are writing.

   
   

FUCKING IDIOTIC WRITER MODE 2 - JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Better to have too many files than too few. All files are copied. Precaution is nicer than caution.

*

So much for the flashback.
   After blogging about checking archives, I checked the archives again. And I found a file folder in one location. Forty-odd files inside it. All tied to a specific date in 2013.
   What.
   The.
   Fuck!?!
   :0

*

I did nothing. The hard drive requiring examination was the one stored in my skull. I consulted the memory banks. No computer files were touched. I did nothing.
   It's important to do that whole nothing routine, once in a while.
   Still, I did nothing. No frantic keyboard attack. Unwise. Just think it through. There was a purpose to the folder when created. What was it? Two years on, what was it?
   Why is the creature nowhere else?
   The folder is misleading. Concentrate on the files. Search the 2013 archive for those files. One by one, they popped up. A few files were derived from the internet.
   Timeline. I still relied on the public library for a regular internet service back then. Therefore...
   These files, grouped into one folder on one day for sheer convenience...
   Yes, these files were gathered off the internet or generated as a result of internet activity. I'd read an article then write a piece, say.
   It's a TEMPORARY folder. The files in it have all since gone into the right sub-folders within the 2013 archive.
   I am staring at a digital appendix. Useful, in its day. But its day is long-done. The folder was shunted aside, but not deleted. It should have been wiped...

*

Better to have too many files than too few. All files are copied. Precaution is nicer than caution.

*

And there's my lesson, taught right back at me two years down the line. I checked the files existed in the 2013 archive, and deleted the stragglers. Well. Damn.

FUCKING IDIOTIC WRITER MODE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

This takedown of a fucking idiotic writer won't be pleasant.
   Is there such a thing as a pleasant takedown of an idiotic writer? Yes. There are sugar sprinkles and unicorns and rainbows during a nice takedown. This story does not feature unicorns. Or sugar sprinkles. There is no rainbow at the gold's end, and no bloody gold anyway.

*

Bloodied gold would be a fucking luxury. At least you could wash your hands with it. Er. Right, moving on...

*

I've written about backing your work up. The best form of doing this is still publication. Shove your stories out there.

*

For those who came in late, here are a few posts on archiving. I'll wait for you.

AN ARCHIVAL REPORT.

YET ANOTHER ARCHIVAL REPORT.

A SCINTILLATING REPORT ON MATTERS OF COMPUTING.

*

Shit flows uphill if it is runny and the wind is strong enough.

*

Okay. Back up your files. Save copies in multiple locations. Publish. Have several profiles running on your computer, in the event of profile failure. This much we know, based on the reports listed above.

*

Of course I'm the fucking idiotic writer being taken down.

*

I did something unbelievably fucking stupid when it came to creating and saving files. It doesn't fucking matter that this only applied to three items.
   They were images and not stories. Doesn't fucking matter.
   We aren't talking about screwing up an entire novel, massive bundles of text, or tax forms. Doesn't fucking matter.
   It was all still fucked up, just the same.

*

Shit flows downhill. That's a system. I use it. The system works. I only deviate from the system to improve the system. That's what I tell myself. Usually, it's true. I do the right thing.

*

What I don't do is switch to FUCKING IDIOTIC WRITER mode.

*

And now, to our story.
   It wasn't a stormy windswept potato-mashed night. The system worked. Save everything and copy everything to multiple locations.
   But wait a bit. How do I generate files? Where is the source of this digital Nile? On a computer that is not connected to the internet, that's where. That computer sits next to an external hard drive.
   Or the external hard drive sets next to the computer.
   Microsoft Word creates its own backup files. Beyond that basic level of automation, the extra hard drive is usually the first port of call when it comes to backing things up.
   That is, unless I back things up on a USB device before reaching for the external drive. Or, for reasons technical and strange, I might make a copy of everything and store that archive on the same computer. Temporarily.
   Anyway, there is no internet at the SOURCE.
   The internet computer lives a short walk away from the SOURCE. A device must be carried along the hallway to the other place, to reach the shores of the internet. That device unloads its data after a physical journey involving footsteps.
   Whirrr, click. Now there's ANOTHER copy of the material, on the internet computer's hard drive. Hooray. A few more clicks, and that new archive is saved yet again - to the cloud.

*

Copied archives are special. They are only added to from sources generated in another room.
   Water flows from the SOURCE.
   If an archive stands in the way for technical reasons, the whole archive is blasted and replaced - though even outdated and outmoded archives survive: you never know. The last file that went all corrupt on me was the profile mentioned back there in my scintillating report on matters of computing.
   The rule...
   I don't generate new files and store them solely in the copied archives. That way lies madness. New files must be housed at the SOURCE and cloned to other locations.
   Always.

*

Everything was backed up.
   Move on. Year's end. Time to create the final back up copy - a DVD, set away in a fireproof safe.
   And that means it's time to check the files, in case there are bullshit items - definitely no longer required.
   I've grown more careful about that final check down the years, not less careful. The process takes longer each year. Well, true, there's more content. But, even so.

*

This year, I sit down and have the strange sensation that I created files and dropped them solely into a copied archive. In the wrong territory. Not at the SOURCE.
   I mean I walked into another room, created files, and dumped items in the archived copy there.
   Are you sure?
   I'm not sure. But if the hunch is right, then...
   These files don't exist in the ORIGINAL archive. If I lost all the back up copies, and kept the original archive, all would be well in computer land, right...
   Except.
   Wait.
   I created some files.
   Yes.
   And I dropped them in the archive when I was done.
   Right.
   Just checking this.
   Sure, sure.
   But. I was sitting in a different chair.
   No.
   Facing a different way.
   Are you certain?
   So I must have been in the other room.
   Come on. Shit doesn't flow uphill. You wouldn't generate new content and dump it in one isolated copied archive. All copied archives are the same. Those containment barrels never turn radioactive. Clones are each other.
   But...
   Seriously. The last time you messed with files, this way, was NEVAH!!!
   There's always the outside chance that I've screwed this up beyond all recognition without setting off a single alarm until now, here, at the year's end. Based on an inkling of a twinkling of a hunch.
   Well, you'd better fucking check more than the mere memory of which fucking way you were sitting when you made shit up.

*

I checked. There were all sorts of warped possibilities. I wanted to avoid adding problems to the mix. After checking thousands of files in countless folders, using a few sideways moves and arcane detection that I'm not even sure qualifies as a computer technique...
   There.
   Three blog-related files, all images, jumped for my throat. Well. Fuck.

*

Narrative.
   I was seated at this computer. Files were required. I summoned those files from the back up archive on this machine.
   And then I generated new content from those archived files. I mashed a few new pictures together out of old photos, basically.
   AT THAT POINT, I should have copied the new files to a USB device and marched them along to the original depository at the SOURCE.
   But I didn't reach for a USB drive. I stared at three new files on my desktop, and slotted them into the right folder in the back up archive.
   No big deal? They were in the right folder, right.
   Oh, yes, big deal...

*

Until I found those three files, and realised what I'd done, I was convinced that I'd written new story material on the wrong computer, and sidelined important content into a dusty file folder that might never see the light of day again.

*

Where the fuck is that story I wrote, and what the fuck was it anyway?
   It wasn't quite real. Didn't exactly exist. Reaching for one big folder, three thousand files later, I knew that as truth.
   The story material? Was real. Stored at the SOURCE, as well as in the cloned archives. Same as fucking usual. I just mixed the creation of a tale with the generation of a few images, and lost myself in the shuffle.
   Digital sigh.

*

The story I wrote was safe. Three minor blog-related pictures laughed at me. I know echoes of them laughed in my e-mail in-box, for the published blog is sent there as another form of archiving.

*

Same shit every fucking January. Throughout the year, files are saved, peacefully, and all is right with the world. Come year's end and year's start, there's this business of picking through bones in the fire, looking out for quirks, mistakes, and fucking stupid computer moves.

*

To my knowledge, that's the first time I violated the inviolable rule concerning archives. The archives are for dumping copies in, not for losing original files in.
   I could have fucked that up spectacularly. Luckily, I didn't screw anything around too badly. The potential was there.
   Lesson. The old one. Don't just archive. Check your archives.

*

I'm going to leave out a detailed description of all the possible combinations of wrongness I waded through, in checking files.
   It isn't enough to count folders and files and think, when numbers tally, that the main vault and the archive copy somehow magically match.
   No. I checked file-creation times and data-sizes. Yes, it's a lot of fun and I recommend having a go. Mm.
   Haven't lost a file yet. Ditched plenty of files and folders that deserved to die. I killed them with fire, and citrus-sprayed the remains.

*

The end? It never ends. The fun keeps funning. Even organising your files, regularly backing things up, a few items drift. Generally, drifting equals needless duplication of material.
   Better to have too many files than too few. All files are copied. Precaution is nicer than caution.
   As I sit here, the three troublesome items are duplicated. But they were automatically copied on blog publication, when the blog posts went to my e-mail.
   I didn't know, when my spider-sense tingled, what the problem was. Could have been Doctor Octopus, for all I knew. I thought a story went astray, and not a mere three images.
   The creation of three wayward files represented the evil tip of a satanic iceberg. That's the awkward lumbering point I faced. Real or imagined, the iceberg was checked. Coffee featured heavily in my plans.

*

There's not enough coffee in the world. After writing this blog post, I decided to REALLY check things. Conclusion? My archival vaults are part of a strange cosmic joke.
   These cloned files don't quite match up. Year on year, variations sneak in. My solution is to stagger march in there and standardise everything.
   Much of the information was in a standard format. But much is not all. I changed this thing one year and that thing the next. Only at a distance of several years, coffee to hand, do I detect the remains of the tangled path I walked.
   I may squeeze another blog post out of this. Or not.

VERY BASIC ARCHIVING FOR AUTHORS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Falling foul of the machines, I plunged through netting. The barrier snapped, and I plunged again. More netting. Snap. More netting. Safety, finally.
   Believe in safety. Plan for danger.
   Let's suppose you write stories on a machine that is very clearly not a manual typewriter. A manual typewriter is a different creature. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
   You are brand-new to computers. Where's the off-switch? That new.

*

Wait. The START button is also the STOP button? That's confusing. And not at all like a light-switch.
   What is the START button? Just an icon that propels a balloon labelled START, if I hover the pointer over that wordless START button. Or NON-START button, I think.
   Surely once the machine has started, thanks to the physical clicky on-switch thingy, I don't need a virtual START button on the screen?
   Oh, only to stop the computer. Okay. And for menu access. Some other things. Like ordering pizza.
   Now there's a new version without a START button?
   The mudder ate the fodder? Bunch of cannibals.
   Doublewait. The START button isn't the same as the START screen or the START menu. Is there a STOP button, and a STOP screen, and a STOP menu?
   For the version without a START button, I can download a START button. Is that done through e-mail or Ouija Board?
   And so on.

*

I'm typing this on a machine that makes use of an operating system named Windows. Because, in the real world, that's how we gain access to stuff. Not through doors. Jim Morrison's estate would've sued.
   The Microsoft Corporation is too evil to be destroyed. Our only hope is that we send someone back in time to whisper in the ear of Bill Gates.
   Change for the sake of change, rather than change for genuine improvement, is guaranteed to piss computer users right off.
   Still waiting on that time travel patch. Then we're ready for launch. A suitable chair backed by a large spinning disc, a consignment of brass fittings, and the package is done.

*

Progress was made. I haven't seen an error message containing the word THREAD for a long long time. The BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH is pretty much a thing of the past...
   Well, I heard the latest version is pastel.
   Fatal Exception is not a thriller.

*

I am here to speak of very basic archiving. For authors. A story starts life inside your mind. Or in someone else's - you just write things down.
   Scribbled notes don't do a roaring trade on Amazon. You'll want to type this material. Load it, laboriously, into a computer. If you wish to use voice-related software and speak your story into a machine...
   ...and you are Scottish, you'll save a lot of grief by loading the story, laboriously, into a computer - by means of typing.
   Save your file. Try to have software set up so the file saves automatically every little while. Set the software so the file automatically creates a back-up copy once saved.
   Store files in folders. Make copies of folders and store those elsewhere. On another computer. And on a USB device. On an external hard drive. And on a DVD, itself stored in a fireproof safe. Save another version of the archive into cloud storage on the internet.
   Yes I've mentioned this stuff before, and recently. Ask yourself the burning question...
   If your house burns down, is the story gone?
   Not if you published - the greatest form of archiving there is.

*

But wait a bit, what prompted this blog post?
   There are other basic things worth doing. Spare files? Great. Spare cables? Essential. My external hard drive failed. No it didn't. The USB cable was dead. I had a spare connector to hand.
   This is a very specific connector. I'd have to research reality to tell you the exact phylum. ;)
   When archives appear to fail, check the wiring. Check plugs and fuses if you feel you must.
   My computer stopped dead in its tracks. In olden times, we faced whirring and clicking, the operation of gears, a few puffs of steam, and then the magic box activated.
   The other day, I switched the machine on and couldn't walk, crawl, or roll past the first stage.
   My profile failed to load.
   What?
   That's right. My card wasn't accepted at the mansion, and I was turned away. But it's MY mansion. I'd have climbed through the windows, but I couldn't use Windows at all. Irony.
   The operating system pretended to load, but went on strike. What's the profile? It's the button I click to say I'm here. A digital doorbell, granting instant access.
   In olden times, after the whirring and clicking, you'd have access. You were the computer user. Progress came along and muddied things.
   Computers could have different users, with different profiles and varying degrees of access to computer functions. Fine for an office, in a building staffed by the Hordes of Mordor.
   The boss has access to porn, while the workers have access to better porn and publishing software. You know the drill.
   Fine for an office packed with people. But utterly fucking irrelevant to an author far from the madding crowd.
   I went from being a user of a computer to a user of a computer with a profile. Instead of pressing a button to switch the machine on, I pressed a button, waited, and pressed another button to confirm launch.
   There's probably a way around this stage, but, frankly, I've lost the will to explore the option.
   Why would I need a second profile? I'm the administrator. That makes me sound as though I am a regional governor, with direct control over my territory. Fear will keep the local systems in line - fear of this, ahem, koff...
   Where was I?
   I had all these back-up archives. But I only had one profile. If I couldn't click the bloody thing to make the computer work, my computer was just a whirring lump.
   The profile material turned corrupt. Yes, this was a first for me. I'd overlooked a basic archiving point. Spare keys.
   To me, the introduction of a profile was a non-event. An extra click on the way to using the computer. But it lurked on my new machine for the better part of five months, before ambushing me.
   My old machine also has the profile clicking stage. I no longer have a computer that predates this innovation. Even the one before that had the same process going for it.
   I have to think back to the machine before that one, to see things in sepia. A man walked in front of my computer, waving a flag to warn pedestrians. No horse were harmed in the operation of that computer.

*

The profile is useless.
   I stared at this obstacle. The solution was to enter SAFE MODE. From there, I gained access to the computer. I had several repair options.
   One didn't work. I tried another. The machine came back to me. All was right with the world. In full normal mode, I immediately created a reserve profile. The computer was in full normal mode, too.
   This blog post is for people who haven't a clue about archiving. Make copies of your work. Store them in different locations. Have reserve systems in play, whether computers or cables.
   How do you activate the safe mode? Switch your computer on. Hit the F8 button on your keyboard until you see a page all about safe mode. When I say hit that button, I mean like this...
   DING DING DING DING DING DING DING.
   Repeatedly. No. More often than that.
   Create multiple profiles for yourself. Make sure you are the administrator in each case. Yes, this is very basic archiving advice for authors.
   Learn about restoring the machine to its last known good configuration. And learn about restore points. Hell, just learn. Though this blog post dealt with Microsoft's fun scheme, your own operating system will have its brand-named netting.
   Believe in safety. Plan for danger. Walk the tightrope without a net if you must. Fall. Rise again.

*

  
All those archives and copies were supplies. I couldn't cart them anywhere without my trusty workhorse: the computer. Archiving is part of the story.
   My mistake in not creating a spare set of keys? Basic. Flawed. Repairable. Fortunately.

*

  
What's this next item?
   C:
   It's an unlucky horseshoe emoticon. ;)