by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
And now for a very brief public service announcement. Please back up your work.
What way is easiest for you? There are so many options.
The best way is to have a digital copy backed up—on a USB/thumb drive, as an email attachment in an email sent to yourself. In Dropbox. On Google Drive or Skydrive (these are free options for cloud backup). On a server in your home. Or just print the thing if you don’t mind retyping it if you lose a digital version.
My children laugh at me because I wander through rooms as they do homework and ask, “Have you backed up? Are you backing up? Have you hit save?” They’ll say, “Yes, Mom.” I’ll think they’re just placating me (sometimes they are) and will say, “Let me see how you’ve saved the file.” If I don’t see a file name for the document, there’s trouble on the horizon and Mom is mad. That’s another way we lose work and the train of thought—if our computer freezes and needs a reboot. And then I ask them to email me their most important files for school.
My son, a high school junior, asked me a few days ago how often I hit save as I’m writing. Every couple of sentences. No joke. He asked how often I back up and I answered, “Every writing session.”
There are programs that will do this automatically for you, so you don’t have to think about it. But since I’ve trained myself to do it automatically, I don’t need the programs.
I’ve lost work before and it’s not fun. In fact, despite all my efforts, I lost a research-related document last week that I’d spent a day working on. Not sure how it happened. It seemed that maybe I accidentally hit select-all and delete…and then saved the empty file.
We work hard. We have ideas and dialogue and scenes that are hard to replicate. Hit save. Then back up to an outside device or cloud or piece of paper.
How good are you about backing up your documents? What’s your favorite way to save your work?
Image: MorgueFile: Alvimann
I use Mozy Home to back up my files every day, and I also use Dropbox, which I like because I sometimes work at a different computer. Last week, my husband installed a wireless hard drive so that we can all back up our work to one place. I haven’t transferred any files yet, but I will be working on that this weekend. I often send my files to myself so that I can retrieve them from my email if anything goes wrong, and I have Word set up to back up every 5 minutes. Yup, I’ve been through the experience of losing a file, and I’m going to do everything to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Heather—Thanks for coming by! Sorry you’ve lost a file in the past…it’s such a terrible experience. I’m not familiar with Mozy Home…I’ll check it out. :)
I back up just about as often. I typed a paragraph, I hit save. When I’m done for the day, I back up on a thumb drive and print out the pages. And once a week, I back up everything with my external hard drive.
Alex–You sound like me! I just *hate* losing work.
Elizabeth – I couldn’t possibly agree with you more. Sadly, I learned the hard way about backing things up, but I do it now! I use Carbonite. It’s not expensive, it’s guaranteed, and it backs everything up automatically so I don’t have to worry about it. Please, folks, back it up!
We are in the same school. Auto back each minute when working. Each session generates backups to two flash drives, a storage server, and an external drive. It takes five minutes for the incremental backup to run.
Five minutes! I’ve spent longer than that searching for my hand notes.
I hate data loss. Bloody stuff is hard enough that it doesn’t require a “forced” redraft.
I remember back in the seventies the day hugely successful author Jilly Cooper left the ONLY hand-written copy of her new blockbuster on the tube. Despite pleas, she never got it back and had to rewrite the whole book. It still makes me shudder to think about it. :( I’ve been backing up my writing ever since.
Marilyn–Oh, that would have made me so sick to have lost an entire book! It’s never quite the same when you rewrite it.
Jack–Yes! It takes no time at all. Trying to find lost work takes forever (and is usually lost for good). You’re right–it’s so hard to write this stuff that we don’t need to lose it.
I back up constantly! I even take my most important stuff with me on a thumb drive in my purse. I also got a new external for my birthday. It’s tiny and holds everything. Plus Craig has one at work. (In case the house burns down.)
Diane–I even had an external fail me once…scary! But I had the manuscript backed up other places too. I think I had to rewrite a small amount, but not much. And smart to have a backup outside the house.
I think I backup more often than I even realize! I always save everything right to my flash drive (and know if there’s a fire, it’s the first thing I’ll grab. Ok, maybe after the cat). Then I’ll backup to my laptop and print a hard copy. And since I’m emailing my chapters to readers right now, it’s saved there as well.
Sarah–Sounds like you’ve got the back-ups covered! You’re smart–it’s good to back up in more than one location.
I’ve switched to using OneDrive as my file location. It auto synchs to my laptop, PC, iPad, iPhone etc. That means the file is in the cloud (backed up by Microsoft) and a copy is on my local HD.
I can edit on my laptop without connection to the Internet and it will automatically synch next time I connect. I can also read/edit the same doc from any other device.
As added security, my system auto-images my HD every night. I also “save” every couple sentences. I once had to pay $1500 for data recovery and don’t ever want that again.
Peace, Seeley
Seeley–Oof. $1500 for data recovery…that would be painful. Sounds like you’ve got all the bases covered now for your backups.
Thank you for the finger-wagging, Elizabeth. I’ve never been seriously burned for failing to back up work, so I especially need your message. It fits perfectly with the five hours I spent earlier in the week, watching with arms folded as the cursor dodged around on my screen. A Microsoft Level 2 techie in New Dehli was trying to figure out how to add page numbers to a manuscript written years ago, in a version of Word many versions removed from the current one. Five hours. Your caution and the brain-numbing pagination thing will now be firmly linked in my mind.
Barry–Oh how frustrating! Cursors should stay where we put them. Glad you were able to get that fixed.
We rely so much on these computers and they seem so incredibly efficient so much of the time…until they suddenly bomb or are dropped or are spilled on or….
Yes, and that’s when I reveal myself to myself. It’s not pretty.
Hi Elizabeth
I’m pretty militant about this, though still not as much as I need to be. I have everything on a pen stick, the hard drives of both my mac and my little writing PC and it all saved to my time machine as well. Despite doing all of this, I opened one of last year’s manuscripts a few weeks ago (my brother had foolishly offered to read all of last year’s books to tell me which one to start editing next) and discovered the last thirty thousand words had somehow vanished… I’m still suffering from that one, particularly as I pants everything. I remember how it ends of course, but not exactly how I got there. It was the longest book I’ve written at 150,000 words and whether I’ll ever get around to going back to it now I’m not sure.
So, backing up is good, assuming you do it right :) I have to big up Scrivener at this point for it’s autosave function, which means on the rare occasion when my computer has crashed, I’ve lost at most one or two sentences.
cheers
Mike
Oh, wow. 30,000 words is a lot…hope you go back to it, though. Sounds like you’ve got even more backup measures now.
I’m pretty good after having my laptop completely crash a couple of times. I use Mozy & Drop Box, then every few weeks I back up on an external drive. And once every few months I’ll email. A touch paranoid perhaps! :)
Jemi–Paranoia is good when it comes to backing up!
This is important advice! Our house was broken into a couple years ago around Christmas and my laptop taken. I was horrified. We live in the country and never had any problems like this before. By God’s grace, the thieves were caught the same day and still had our stuff in their car. It took awhile but finally did get my computer back. Thank you for this reminder to continue backing up my files. You never know what may happen…I’ve learned the hard way!
Cynthia–How awful! Glad to hear that you were all right and your property was recovered. Must have scared you to death. But you’re right–that’s exactly the kind of thing we need to prepare for….the worst case scenario. A theft or a fire or some sort of storm damage that might destroy our computers. That’s why it’s great to email (if we have web mail with our email service) or back up to a cloud like Google Docs or SkyDrive or Dropbox.
Hi Elizabeth .. I do save my stuff – but need to have another look .. as someone changed something – so I don’t feel quite so secure … I need to learn to use Google Docs and Drop Box and other things more efficiently ..
Thanks for the reminder .. my blog posts are all in Word … and I was printing them ou t- but the poor trees …
I need to sort my brain out from the wood! Cheers Hilary
Came to this post late, but here’s another way to back up: if you have a web-based mail service, like Gmail, you can send your work as an attachment to yourself. Gmail is searchable, so it should be easy to find if needed.
I also use Dropbox and a thumb drive. Lightning strikes twice, I figure, so a third place is extra insurance :)
My biggest regret is the novel that is stuck on the hard drive of my previous laptop. I thought I transferred the Scrivener files to the new one, but when I tried to open it, I realized that all that came across was the desktop shortcut, not the novel itself. So I started up the old one to do it again–and it completely, totally fried right then and there. One of these days I hope to have enough money to rescue my novel from that old hard drive, as it can be a very expensive job.