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Backing up your story?
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Preston
(last edited May 23, 2014 02:45AM)
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May 23, 2014 02:44AM
Where do you back-up your story? Do you back it up on more than one hard-drive, cloud server etc?
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I back up on Google Drive and Onedrive and periodically send it to my gmail.Oh and on Dropbox too!
Dropbox, Google Drive, and on an external hard drive. You can never be too careful with these things. ;-)
I use the free storage on Amazon Cloud. It's easy to do and I back it up whenever I make changes to any of my published works or add new material to my Current Work In Progress. It's easier than in the old days, when your WIP was on a stack of typewriter paper, usually just one copy, and if your house or apartment burned down, so did your manuscript.
I write my scenes in Simplenote on my iPad, sent them to my email as back-up until they're downloaded from SimpleNote into Scrivener. My latest versions are backed up on a separate hard drive. And most of my work, including WIPs, are on my iPad as ePubs.
In all your electronic cloud things, read the fine print. Be sure that by posting your work to Google Drive you are not losing rights to it. (This will be in the fine print that you have to sign off on when you open your account.) It is vastly unlikely that after your best-seller is published Google will sue you for the rights because at one point you had a draft of the ms up in their Drive. But we are talking anal-retentive backup here.Remember that electronics fail or go out of date. There are music CDs now that cannot be played on modern CD players -- some change of format made them obsolete.
If you are truly anal, print out the ms. Paper is fragile, but stays legible for a long time. Make two copies minimum. Keep one yourself and mail the other to your sister in Duluth. If your house burns down she will have the copy; the odds of both your houses flooding or burning down are not high.
I email regular copies to myself and put them in a seperate folder in my email account. There is always the risk that your email can be hacked I suppose but doing it this way my work has survived two computer crashes which required reboots. I have never used the cloud storage tbh I don't think I fully trust it :)
C.l wrote: "I have never used the cloud storage tbh I don't think I fully trust it ..."
Not sure why you wouldn't trust it, but if it's also on your computer, the likelihood of the cloud vanishing at the same time your computer crashes is minuscule. I also back up my computer every month on a flash drive, but that's not really sufficient as a WIP backup, since disasters can happen the day before your next one. Still, it's better than nothing, and it does give me two backups if my computer should fail.
Not sure why you wouldn't trust it, but if it's also on your computer, the likelihood of the cloud vanishing at the same time your computer crashes is minuscule. I also back up my computer every month on a flash drive, but that's not really sufficient as a WIP backup, since disasters can happen the day before your next one. Still, it's better than nothing, and it does give me two backups if my computer should fail.
I just save it without any backup. Of course I do the same thing when writing that I do when playing a video game, I get so far and think okay time to stop and shut off my game or program without saving like an idiot..I think I need a backup plan!
It is not that your cloud server will crash. It is that it will just go away, because Google decides that it is better business to do something else. Hopefully if they do this they will tell everybody in advance so you can get your stuff off. But if they don't, or if you are away from home or something at the time?
I just email them to myself. I have lost manuscripts in crashes (and years ago because my sister decided to reformat a disk). Fortunately after the last crash my brother-in-law was able to extract my work in progress from the hard drive.
I'm constantly working on my works during my lunch break at my full time job so I always have a backup of before working on it for the day and after. I also back it up on an external drive...when I remember to...
I send a copy to my email every few days and backup to my hard file every day that I write. So far, I haven't been burned.
I have recently started using Dropbox and I love it. Backed up on one hard drive and on a cloud server is working thus far. I only wish Dropbox allowed me to save directly from my desktop to the cloud server as opposed to working on my file on the cloud server. I have a program that automatically backs up entire hard drives, so maybe I can get that to work the way I want it.
I use a variety of sources including an external drive, Dropbox, Google Docs, and Skydrive.
I also email myself from time to time. Not often enough!
I back up my story in the trunk of my car. Unfortunately, driving in reverse has restricted visibility. I accidentally ran over a man in a wheel chair backing up my new book the other day. It turned out okay. He happened to be a literary agent who had rejected my last novel.
I like to have:1. Original on my computer
2. Copy on my laptop via SugarSync (like Dropbox)
3. Copy in the cloud with SugarSync
4. Copy on an external harddrive (via Time Machine for Macs)
5. Copy in another service like SimpleNote or Evernote for good measure.
All except #5 is completely automated., and SugarSync and Time Machine both save revisions as well.
