Either back it up or Try not to care

Last week, I accidentally deleted about 4 months of work in my “Marshall Creative” desktop folder. I had countless Word files, audio files, blah blah blah. Just a ton of stuff. After looking at a few external back-up files and my server, I realized that with all of the irregularly-timed saving I do for the big stuff — and the constant attachments I’m emailing — it really didn’t matter. It was like I accidentally set fire to a ton of stuff that really didn’t matter. In the classic Omega Man movie they say that “Nothing quite cleanses like fire.”  At MC, we use Basecamp for all of our file sharing and just opened an account on Dropbox for the bigger stuff.  This unexpected and forgettable fire made me think — why do I need 9 versions of the same document in 9 different places?  Can’t a web article live on a virtual writeboard and, once it’s posted, can’t the link be the ultimate source for that content?  I’m wondering of Microsoft Word isn’t as useful as I’d thought.