Freehold Friday: Backups. A tale of one Glock, 3 ducks, and Evernote.

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Freehold Friday: Backups. A tale of one Glock, 3 ducks, and Evernote.

Howdy Freeholders!

So I’m sitting here down by river in the mobile office this rainy, cold, windy day, dictating the blog—check out the view from yesterday! (pardon the shaky-ass panorama shot…I’m still getting the hang of it on the iPhone)

Sure beats sitting behind my desk staring at a computer screen. I don’t know what it is about water (especially moving water) that just sets me in a creative mood, but there you go.

So here’s the writing update: This week I’m making strides toward getting my work professionally edited (yes, I have arrived) while at the same time I’m outlining Season 2 of Solar Storm. Y’all have made it abundantly clear by the sales and volume of emails that you want moar, so I shall giveth thou more! In the meantime, Solar Storm 4 is now live! And Solar Storm 5 is currently on preorder, release date set for May 12th.

I also finished the first draft of Cooper’s book, Oathkeeper, this week. It’s headed to the editing phase, hoping to release that soon. I’ve also got an outline ready and even written the first chapter of a book starring everyone’s favorite anti-hero, 13. More on that later though…

Okay. Update complete, here comes the blog (open wide!).

Anyway, I thought today I’d bring you something a little bit different. I’ve got a nice synergy between prepping and writing going on that I just couldn’t pass up. It all stems from my involvement in my local police department’s Citizens Police Academy. Now before you get all excited, no there’s nobody in there making funny noises, and we don’t have anybody like Tackleberry ready to blow things up at a moments notice. It’s a lot more civilized than that. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just keep reading and forget what you just read.

So let me start by saying that the Citizens Police Academy is probably one of the coolest things I’ve done. It’s a 17 week course and they meet once a week on Wednesday nights for three hours. Normally, I arrive at the police station and we go down to the briefing room and have a lecture from one of the officers or specialists on any range of subjects from evidence collection to forensic science to traffic stops, DUIs and even Mission Teams (drug interdiction, hostage crisis, active shooter, etc.) and SWAT tactics. We also do quite a fair amount of hands-on programs.

Last time, our subject of the day was police firearms training. They brought in examples of the weapons that the officers train on including Glock 21s and AR 15 rifle platforms. We were lectured by several different rangemasters who were also army veterans and got some cool inside information on how the department trains, why they use the weapons they do (here’s a hint: they just work! More on that later) and other anecdotal information that you can’t get from a website. To a writer like me, that is absolute gold.

After the classroom portion of the night, we were taken to the firing range in the police headquarters and used training pistols to shoot some simulated ammunition, they called simunition which is a bullet sized ammo containing a tiny paint ball. It hurts when you’re hit, but obviously not as much as a real bullet and probably not as much as a true paintball (which is much bigger) either. The training guns were exact duplicates of the real thing to make it all as realistic as possible. As luck would have it, I have shot a Glock before, so I knew what to expect, unlike several of the other people in my class.

The rangemaster was telling us how the officers also have high stress simulations they train for, where one officer will dress up in protective gear and pretend to be a belligerent drunk, a angry protester, or perhaps even a burglar trying to break into a building. They have fake doors and whole sets they set up in the firing range, then put officers through their paces, up to and including discharging their weapon (simunition only of course) at the suspect if the suspect is armed and tries to do the same.

I won’t go into the details, one: because it happened so fast, two: because there was a lot of screaming and shouting involved, and my adrenaline was pumping so I wasn’t really sure what else was going on around me. Suffice it to say, it was very intense and I have a newfound respect for anyone who wears the uniform.

When I stepped out into the firing range armed with my simulated pistol I was told the person in front of me was messing with the door to a warehouse in the industrial district at 2 AM and nothing else. So I pretended to get out of my squad car and approached the individual who immediately told me that he was there because he was the owner of the business. Now the good citizen in me wanted to say “Okay, well you have yourself a nice night,” and walk away. But the patrol officer standing behind me quietly whispered in my ear that for safety’s sake, I needed to ask him to keep his hands out of his pockets.

That’s when I realized that I was in way over my head. I’d walked up to a stranger in the dark, by myself (the officer behind me was technically there to tell us what to say if we blanked, because we received no training on this before we were dumped into the simulation) and the guy had his hands in his pockets and talked very fast. Then something clicked—all of my attention focused on him, and I was only vaguely aware of this at the time, but immediately afterwards I realized that I acquired tunnel vision and completely blocked out everything going around me.

I noticed (and wrote down later) all kinds of little details: the way the guy was talking to me was fast and strained, he hunched his shoulders forward like he was ready to run or fight, constantly trying to turn away from me, and keeping his hands in his pockets after I asked him, then commanded him to pull his hands-free—it all set my nerves on edge. Even though I knew we were expected to get into a confrontation—they told us this ahead of time—it was still a heart pounding experience, and I have nothing but respect for the people who do this every day, and not just for pretends. Seriously, cops don’t get enough respect in this country.

At any rate, the suspicious individual had enough of my questioning and spun, pulling his hand from his pocket. I drew my pistol—and I’m proud to say I got mine up faster than him—and started pulling the trigger.

Now here’s where anyone who is way more familiar with guns is going to laugh at me! And I encourage that, just don’t snort your beer just don’t snort your drink through your nose, because that sucks.

In my haste to take down the person who had drawn on me, I started squeezing the trigger before I had a clean sight picture. As a result, my first round popped off and scared the hell out of the floor.

That’s when I would have died.

Despite the fact that all of the officers we talked to confirmed to us that they’ve never had a problem with Glock pistols, the Glock training pistol I shot jammed on the second trigger pull.

Of course this was as soon as my barrel aimed up at the suspect’s chest.

This cause no end of amusement and surprise among the officers, who had just finished giving a lecture on the reliability of not only the standard duty pistols but the training pistols. So there I stood, jammed pistol in my hand as the suspect cracked a smile and pointed his pistol at me.

“BAM, you’re dead!” he said. The suspect/rangemaster then laughed as he pulled off his sweaty face mask and explained, “That’s why you’ve got to keep moving.”

See, never having done this before, when I pulled the trigger I expected it to go bang that second time. When it didn’t, I froze. That gave the suspect enough time to cap my ass. Luckily, in real-life police officers are trained to keep moving and not just stand there like 6’2″ target silhouettes. The other option is to always carry a backup weapon. Just like you see in all those video games, it’s always faster to draw a secondary weapon that it is to reload or fix a jammed primary weapon.

This experience just reinforced my devotion to redundancy and backups in prepping.

Marcus, how the hell does this all tie into writing?

Well, it’s all about the backups. I know you may be thinking: ahh, I know where he’s going with this—something happened and he lost some files on his computer.

No, not quite. Thank God—because my production schedule is pretty hectic and if I lost something right now, I think I’d be reduced to a blubbering, cursing mess. I have a fairly robust backup system (I like to think) for my actual writing.

After I write, Scrivener backs up automatically to Dropbox. When I close out the program, while Dropbox is updating, I take a physical copy of that file that I just closed and copy it to another location on my hard drive. Then every few days, I will take an external hard drive and connect it to my Mac and make a backup of all of my writing.

At the same time, I have another external hard drive (used to be in an old laptop that was too old to run Windows) uses Time Machine to make continuous backups of everything on my computer.

And as for another layer of protection, I have a dedicated NAS cloud server in my house that we use for streaming movies to the different TVs at the Freehold. I also have this set up to copy over Wi-Fi everything on my Mac to the cloud to the private cloud. This I can access from my iPad or my iPhone so I literally have several copies of everything I’m working on.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. The backup I’m talking about is for Evernote. I don’t know how many of you out there use Evernote, but I use it extensively, almost exclusively—till now.

I have notes that list cool websites with neat articles that I intend to make into stories or use as reference or resources for existing stories, I have story ideas, I have to-do lists, I have just about anything you can think of relating to writing in my notes on Evernote—synced to all my devices and computers. And I also have one master note to rule them all, called the Index. I know, original, right? Here’s what last year’s Index looked like (yeah, I do a new one each year because I also track sales and marketing stuff that I only need the current year for reference)…

How I use it is I go into my desktop version of Evernote (why they don’t allow you to do this on the mobile versions I don’t know but it drives me nuts!) And take links for all my various notes and put those links on one note. That way when I start up Evernote and I’m trying to find something, I just click on the link from that one main note and I can jump to anything in my notebooks, of which I have dozens. It took me hours and hours to set up, but I use it every single day and it is a huge timesaver! It’s like having a shortcut list for my shortcuts. It was the perfect solution to having a digital notebook and saved me reams of paper and probably several dozen trees.

Until it all went to shit yesterday.

I happen to be waiting for the dog to do her business and clicked on my phone to do my note review. Finding something interesting that I wanted to write about in my story ideas note, I made a point to remind myself to look it up when I got to the basement writing area. After my dog came in, I grabbed my iPad, a bottle of water, and me and Trinny went downstairs to settle in for some writing. I pulled up the Index on my iPad, prepared to get to busy to get down to work, and found that all of the links on my index were gone.

No cause for panic, the data the names and everything were still there, the original notes were still saved, but all of the links had been removed. I was staring at a screen of nothing but text. So, I closed Evernote out, waited for it to sync, then went to my phone. Sure enough, everything worked fine on the phone.

As a test, I went upstairs to the Mac Mini, pulled it up there, and once again everything worked fine. So it looked like it was simply a problem of something not syncing right on the iPad.

Fine. I went back to the iPad and pulled it up again, only this time I was met with an error message saying it could not sync the file. After several minutes of frustratingly useless effort, I contacted Evernote via email. Moving on with my life, I got back to work.

About an hour later, I got an email from Evernote saying hey, “this happens every now and then here’s how you fix the problem: copy the text out of your note, save it, into a different note, then delete the original note and remove it from the trash can. Then sync your device and everything should go back to normal. If it doesn’t, you at least have the text of the note saved in a separate note.”

Still skeptical I decided what the hell, these people are the experts. So I did it. And my stuff was gone forever. I still have that note with the text sitting in my inbox. But it does me no good, because all it is is a list of the titles of the notes that I had linked to. When I sync to the iPad, instead of Evernote taking the notes from my phone and my Mac and syncing them to the iPad, it took the fact that there was no note on the iPad and synced that blank note to the phone and the Mac.

My precious index file was gone for good (cue Gollum).

After swearing a blue streak for a few moments, I realized it was my own fault. I had gotten so comfortable in backing up the backups, that I viewed Evernote as a backup, itself. It is not. As with all things in the cloud and all things that sync to the cloud, affecting one affects them all, despite what some helpful person at customer service says. (Big eye roll)

The other notetaking app that I have is Notability. This one however, automatically creates backups of your notes in PDF format and put those on the cloud. It’s more of a hassle if you need to get something out of that note, because now it’s in PDF format, but by God, PDF a PDF is not going to just vanish on you unless something happens to the damn cloud server itself.

So guess where some of my more important documents are going to be migrated to?

Since Evernote doesn’t have the ability to create automatic backups, and considers syncing to another device back up enough, all my “mission critical” notes and files will now be going into Notability, which offers the same syncing as Evernote across all my devices, with the added benefit of backing up things to the cloud as either plain text or PDF (including my handwritten notes!).

So this is all rather long-winded dissertation on the values of backing up, I hope you gotten a little bit of motivation to take care of your own backups. Because in this digital world we live in, there’s nothing quite so bowel liquefying as staring at a blank screen that once had been filled with all of your precious hard work.

The three mallards crossing my office window look rather cold and miserable in the chilly rain falling on the river and I’d say they’re pretty unimpressed.