Back Up Your Stuff.

Seems like a no-brainer to me. You create something beautiful when you roleplay. Together with the help of other writers, you build up a story that has never existed before and will never be duplicated, ever {Well, unless it's plagiarised, but that's another topic for another day}.

But I've seen and heard about RPGs closing, or being wiped {Posts all deleted} either by a hacker, or just some careless staff member or even the head admin themselves, when they wanted to 'tidy up.' I'm not kidding. On one board I know of well, that was even the reason stated when someone deleted over 60,000 posts. In character and out of character. Apparently, to them, the only clean forum was an empty one!

And every time one of these incidents happens, the typical member reaction is, "I've lost everything I wrote there! My character bios, my threads, everything!"

Why? When the answer is as simple as hitting "Save Page" and storing it on your hard drive for all time?

A couple of minutes each day could save you a lot of heartache and loss.

Here's how I recommend preserving your material for all time. If you own your own RPG and have access to the database, you should perform a full backup at least once a week, more if you don't also do partial backups. Store these backups on your HD, and not only the most recent copy; just in case anything is wrong or corrupted, store a few older ones as well.

If you don't own your own forum or are just a member where you roleplay, a very effective measure is to create a folder in your hard drive documents area of the same title as the RPG whose stuff you want to save. Then you save the page, in Internet Explorer, since the title of each page will be preserved {Firefox does not do this} without you having to key it in. Store the saved pages in this folder. If a thread you're saving has multiple pages, put a number at the end of the title on all pages after the first.

If and when anything happens and the RPG itself sinks, you now have your lifeboat to keeping your own stuff preserved for all time and your losses have been cut.

If nothing bad ever happens, you can still sleep more easily at night now, knowing that if anything does happen, you have insurance.

For extra safekeeping, I'd occasionaly burn the contents of the folder onto a CD or DVD for permanent storage. You may never look at it again for the rest of your life, but it's kind of like your old childhood photos or even a wedding album. It's nice just knowing you have it.