As I was out walking the other evening, I thought to myself as always, did I turn off all the appliances at home? Did I turn off all the lights? That sort of thing. It also set me to thinking. What if there was a fire? What if I lost everything in my home? What would happen to all my draft manuscripts and the like? Have you asked yourself the same question recently?
I first tackled this subject in a blog post
HERE about using DropBox as a cloud backup tool and today I want to revisit the subject. Many aspiring and established novelists rely on their computer for everything they write and would be lost without it, should something ever happen. Of course, making backups is not a new subject and so some people also make copies to an external hard drive, or a handy memory stick. Then those same people leave that backup device at home!. So, what happens if one day you lose everything in your home? Of course, probably your unfinished book would be the last of your concerns, but one day it may be. What would you do? You'd have to start all over again.
I have been backing my work up
to the cloud for several years now and I'm very comfortable doing this. I use
Live Mesh,
Dropbox and most recently
SafeSync (I'll write another comparative review in a few weeks). Whatever happens, I'm covered. If my PC should die, or my house explode, my manuscripts will live on in the cloud, ready for me to download them again (along with my photos, music, and other digital treasures). Furthermore, if I am away from home and suddenly have an idea for my book, I can log into my account and make direct changes, confident in the knowledge that those changes will be waiting for me on my home PC when I get back to it. Amazing!
So there you go, my thought for the day. How do you backup your writing? I trust you're using something other than good fortune and wishful thinking.
I email my entire manuscript, along with any ideas/notes, to my two Gmail accounts on a daily basis. If Gmail ever explodes, then I'm in trouble, but so far, so good! I also use Dropbox.
ReplyDeleteI write on Scrivener and have it automatically set up to save to my file folder and also to Dropbox.
ReplyDeleteWhen I go for walks I worry that someone will break in and just steal my hard drive :)
Wagging Tales
I use Norton cloud back-up, Norton CD back-up, Google drive back-up, and occasionally I email myself a copy. Religiously...
ReplyDeleteWith Google Docs, now Google Drive, it all goes in the cloud. 5 GB for free. Can hold tons of manuscripts. Backs up automagically.
ReplyDeleteI use a jump drive. It's primitive, but seems to be doing a good job. A few times I lost a lot of work, so now I keep it up to date always. I have secondary jump drives, too.
ReplyDeleteIt's always good to be reminded of this! I always keep a physical copy, an emailed copy, and a drop box copy. The thing to remember is to back it up regularly, or you may find the annoyance of losing several thousand words.
ReplyDeleteI ftp a full backup to my website and make WIP backups to my smartphone. For some reason my Dropbox refuses to connect and sync at home. It works great on my work computers, though.
ReplyDeleteFlash drive-three of them. Google Drive. McAfee online back-up. Email.
ReplyDeleteI occasionally email a copy of my WIP to one of my accounts for a quick backup. I also put it on a "temp" jump drive every now and then. I have my whole writing folder, old projects and new, and OneNote with my notes on a different jump drive. And, I put each finished book on a CD in my fire safe, as well as a CD with all of my WIPS every so often.
ReplyDelete