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Damn. We stayed in Virginia for the first night of our vacation. OK. The next morning, I have it with me... and by the time we reach South Carolina, I don't. It might have fallen out along one of the stops along the way, but I think I might have left it at the hotel in Virginia.

I had a month of work on my most recent game on it, and all my others, too. Looks like I won't be entering the competition...

You know, I put a lot of ideas and time into that game. And some other stuff on there. This sucks, because I know it won't be the same if I try to make it again.

From now on, I will be backing it up weekly. Err. My new one up weekly.

Bummer. Stuff like that has happened to me before, both losing work that I hadn't backed up and losing thumb drives containing valuable stuff. It blows when it happens, but at least it serves as a life lesson. I try to back up everything important on my computer now.

[strike]At least the drive didn't have any porn on it, right?[/strike]

You really gotta back stuff up in more ways than one for it to be safe. Jump drives are too easy to lose, anyway. I'd never misplace my external hard drive.

Store it on the cloud, man. Dropbox for the not lose:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQzMzUyMjk

If you're worried about privacy, you can just use a file archiver and encrypt that sucker up. I recommend 7zip.

(Yes, I'm trying to get you to sign up for it so I get more free space.)

Not to lessen your frustration (because that's really sucky, man, and I'm sorry to hear it), but honestly, saving anything important ONLY on a jumpdrive is asking for serious trouble. They aren't reliable, they are incredibly easy to lose, and being so small anyone could break it by stepping on it or even putting the wrong thing down on top of it. If you need something portable, at least choose something like a mini external HD. They come pretty damn small these days, not too expensive, have tonnes more space, and overall safer (harder to lose, you can protect the content with passwords etc, much more reliable memory type and much harder to break by accident [unless you drop **** or whatever]).

Just remember, even if you've lost previous work, it's all experience towards your next project. It wasn't a complete waste, you know? Trust me, I've been there (back in the days of my floppy disc REFORMATTING ITSELF WHY). I learnt many lessons.

They aren't reliable, they are incredibly easy to lose, and being so small anyone could break it by stepping on it or even putting the wrong thing down on top of it.

Has happened. Twice, actually.

I think I'm going to get one of these other things (external hard drives, Dropbox, etc), or possibly all of them, soon.

What SD says is true. Portable devices are much more failure-prone than hard drives which sit inside of a desktop. They should never the your primary copy, let alone your only copy.

Your post sounds like you're travelling though. If you're not willing to sign up for a online storage account, can you at least e-mail yourself copies every now and then?

Best to have two backups of whatever it is, especially if it's on a failure-prone, easily lost stick of sillicon.

I have a large object on my thumb drive so I don't lose it.

That being said, I also have my computer, and an external hard drive.

Never have anything important without it.

Whaddaya know! We stopped by on our way home, and it turned out that the hotel found it!

...

I think this is a warning from the universe, anyway.

Yeah, I was going to suggest that you call the hotel and see if anyone found it in the room you stayed in. I'm happy you found it though, and now you know to keep better track of its whereabouts when you're carrying it around on vacation.

I like lessons in which you don't actually have to lose a month of hard work, but you still learn something for the future.

I wish they happened more often.

Pretty recently, I was doing a 3 week project on a laptop, and 2 days before it was due, the laptop decided not to start anymore. But, I had saved everything on a jump drive right before this came up. Narrowly averted just by luck.