In 1919, T.E. Lawrence, the dude who wrote the autobiography upon which the movie Lawrence of Arabia is based, was riding on a train in England. With him when he got on the train: his first manuscript for the tome— about 250,000 words worth of detailed recollections of his life as a British soldier working “with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918.” Not with him when he switched trains: The same manuscript. He lost it, and it was never to be found again. Bigger bummer still? He’d burned all of his notes and had to start from scratch. Ninety years later—just last week in fact—Spike Gillespie got up one morning and, as she typically does seven days per week, set to work on her beloved MacBook. She was chugging along, taking one of her frequent research breaks to post something VERY IMPORTANT on Facebook, when her hard drive crashed. Gillespie, though she had backed up her computer a few months prior, had been woefully lacksidasical about archiving her novel-in-progress (47 pages at that point) and the notes for a history book she’s writing. more ›