Years ago, I was writing on deadline (when am I not?). My work-in-progress was about sixty percent complete when my computer screen went blank.
At first, I blamed it on my son. Even when he was in grade school, he was better with computers than I was. He knew it. I knew it. And one day when I fired up my computer for a full day of writing, the startup screen appeared and then disappeared. Shut itself down. I repeated the startup, and the same thing happened. Tried again, with the same result. I think I found other work to do that day until my son got home from school and asked, a mischievous smile on his face, “How’d work go?” He never asked me that, so I knew I’d been had. After I issued every threat I could think of, he admitted to his little trick and put my computer back to the way it was. Grrrr.
But this time, it wasn’t my son’s nefarious schemes. My hard drive failed. I prayed, begged, and tried bribing my computer guru; but my book was gone.
But I’m not totally clueless. I had a backup. Two, in fact. (This was back in the days of diskettes and zip drives.) But I had skipped my backup routine for two or three days before the hard drive failure, so while I hadn’t lost the whole book, I had lost several days of writing. Good writing. Probably the best I’ve ever done.
Something similar recently happened to a friend of mine. She used one of those online backup services, so she should’ve been covered. But there were problems. The backup service had saved a few versions of her corrupted file … but not far enough back to get her to an uncorrupted version. She worked with them and eventually got most of her work restored, but it took several days.
Everyone needs a backup system and strategy—especially writers. What’s yours? How often do you back up your work (not just save, but backup, because, well, what if you saved a corrupted file or overwrote a particularly inspired paragraph?)? Do you back up to flash drives? Do you use an online backup service? Apple’s Time Machine, which saves new or altered documents at regular intervals? Something else?
Please share your backup strategy in the comments. I’d love to steal learn from what you do.
»
I save daily on a thumb drive (though I admit sometimes I forget). I also save monthly onto another thumb drive and every three months everything on my computer gets saved to an external hard drive which I keep in a safety deposit box.
I too have lost work and wasted time trying to restore it. Not fun!
PS Per my earlier post about my blog/web site, does anyone have experience or suggestions on how to store the content of social media posts? My site that FB has ended as a FB Group for sharing local history has many contacts, photos, and pieces of information I want to eventually use in a book–I said that up front, so anyone who participates knows that and gives me permission just by posting. Copy and Paste to a Word document and save in the ways that have been discussed for our writing, or something better that hasn’t come to my mind? Thanks!
Coolmuster.
For ex., I downloaded an extensive series of text messages and wrote a book from them. The text conversations are all saved in a file on my computer.
Off topic:
Thanks for this post:
https://bit.ly/2LkDRdh
Bob, I am very low-tech here. I email a copy of the book to myself on a daily basis and print out new chapters from time to time. Low tech, but it’s worked so far. I did the same thing with my dissertation- all 400 pages.
FREE OPTION:
If you want a free alternative to Carbonite, I recommend Google Drive. You get 15 gb free, which is plenty when simply uploading book files. Like Carbonite, it automatically backs up the folders you tell it to do. And any changes to those folders triggers a new backup.
Also, like many of you, I regularly backup to a thumb drive (two actually).