Staving off Disaster: Never Lose Your Work Again
By Nick Cody
The coffee is brewed and everyone, including the dog, is fast asleep. You’re ready to write the finale for your latest manuscript and you get a giddy sense of excitement as you log into your laptop. A cute picture of a baby tiger appears in your background. You navigate to your “Documents” folder and you eagerly click on your manuscript file. You take a sip of your coffee while you wait for the 400-page masterpiece to load. But it loads instantly. Something must be wrong! Your worst fears are realized as you stare at a blank document. You spray your computer screen with coffee and begin to utter expletives loud enough to wake everyone, including the dog, from their slumber. Somehow your manuscript is gone and you have no idea how it happened or what you are going to do.
While it is rare these days to suffer a complete loss of your manuscript, it is more likely you can find a copy of it somewhere, perhaps in your e-mail, but you’ll be facing the loss of days or weeks of work and that’s no fun. Backing up your work is super-easy and in this post I’ll describe a zillion ways that you can do it.
Let’s talk first about versions of your manuscript.
Versions of your manuscript
You’re probably familiar with the file that holds your manuscript. It’s the Microsoft Word document, Scrivener Project, Ulysses project, or any number of other file types that you use as you work through each of your drafts. This is your latest revision. It’s special, it’s the most precious version of your file.
You also may have versions of your file saved under different names: names such as “My Terrific MS — DRAFT 1.docx” or “My Terrific MS — Beta Read Version.html” or something similar. These are manually-created copy revisions.
You might also have versions of your file that you sent out to editors, agents, and/or beta readers. These are stored on your e-mail server such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.
All of these versions are checkpoints in time. If you know where they are, they will be there for you should you need to go back to these versions. But these versions have one fatal problem, they are there when you thought to create them. Disasters always happen when you least expect them and you need to think about ways to automatically create new version of your manuscript.
What happens if your hard drive dies? In this case all of your local copies will be lost. There are services that can restore hard disks if you become really desperate but be prepared to spend thousands of dollars for these kinds of services. More than likely you’ll at least have an e-mail version you can restore and promote to your latest revision. You’ll cry, open a bottle of wine, and re-do any work you lost. As you weep on Twitter about your misfortune, all of your friends will reply with the same thing, “@nickcoding, do you have any backups?”
Automated Backups
Automated Backups take on two forms: those created by Backup Software and those created by Cloud Drive services. Each form is simply a variant on another version of your file. It’s just automatically created version of your file instead of one manually created by you. This is important.
Backup Software
There are many kinds of backup software out there. They fall into two major categories: online and offline.
Most backup software allows you to restore anything from an individual file to your entire hard drive. Beware, it can take some of the cloud versions of these services, weeks or months to backup your entire machine. It took CrashPlan six months to fully backup by 1TB MacBook Pro.
Offline options include Apple’s Time Machine for the Mac and Microsoft’s Windows Backup for the PC. There are many more and I won’t go into listing them all. Both Apple’s Time Machine and Microsoft’s Windows Backup require an external hard drive to work and they are a convenient way to quickly get a file back quickly. I use Time Machine and it is configured to backup every hour. This means that every hour I get a new version of all of my files and I have the ability to restore any of these versions. The main disadvantage to the offline backups is they are susceptible to the same flood, fire, and meteor from space damage that your computer is subject to. They lack geographic redundancy (they’re not backing up somewhere else that’s safe).
Online options are the other category of backup software. There are many online services that store your files safely in the cloud, that magical place where your files are safe in a cushiony environment, a place where they have a good chance of lasting any localized disaster with the exception of an E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event). Cloud services are never immune to failure, but they are extremely reliable and far more reliable than a typical home computer.
I use CrashPlan and Backblaze online systems and both of these systems allow you to restore your entire hard drive or a single file. Both of these systems store multiple snapshots of your files too, and you can pick which snapshot you want to restore. These two articles tell you how it’s done in each system:
I recommend you use backup software whether it’s of the online or offline variety because it’s transparent and automatic and can save you when you last expect to need it. If you choose to use offline system like Time Machine, consider using one of the Cloud Drive services I’ll discuss next. This way, you have a local copy you can access easily and a cloud version that’s highly resilient to local disasters.
While Time Machine and Windows Backup are free, the online solutions are almost never free. But they aren’t expensive either, like $6 a month or so. Every time the moon is full or new, skip an expensive Americano in the morning and you’ll be good to go.
Cloud Drive Services
Cloud Drive services are not designed to back up your whole computer, though they can if you point them at your entire C:\ drive. I would not do this, however. Cloud Drive services are mostly useful for storing your Documents, Pictures, and Movie folders (or whatever). The way these services work is to start a synchronization operation on any folders you tell it to watch. This effectively brings all of these folders into the Cloud. Software running on your computer watches for any changes to any file in any of these folders, and uploads new versions to the cloud without you thinking about it.
I use Dropbox and Google Drive for this. Both of these services allow you to work locally, without any connection to the Internet, and will happily reconnect to the cloud the next time you go online. In this case, any changes you made wile offline will be automatically synchronized to the cloud. Plus, they are both free!
Just like Backup Software, your Cloud Drives store multiple versions of your files. Versions are usually created every time you save. They usually store every version of your files as well but they are typically limited to 30-days of storage.
Dropbox has an extended version history feature which can extend this. You can read more here:
- Dropbox previous versions: https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/11 (30 days)
- Dropbox extended version history: https://www.dropbox.com/help/113 (up to a year)
Google Drive similarly stores multiple versions of your files, and there is a hidden feature where you can click on a revision and save “Save forever”, this will allow you to keep a specific version indefinitely.
Don’t Wait
Don’t wait for disaster to strike you. Learn about any of these backup options and keep your manuscript safe from peril. I hope you found this overview useful. Happy (safe) writing!
Disclaimer
I hope you can leverage some of the options out there to help keep your files safe from accidental deletion, physical damage, or any number of other unfortunate accidents that can leave you with a lost manuscript. That said, you need to learn the ins and outs of your solution and be warned that any solution will never be failsafe. Be careful and I recommend you use multiple methods to keep your files safe.
Nick works in NYC and commutes from Long Island. He writes computer code and enjoys drawing, cinema, and music. Nick is working on his first novel, The Harvester, a science fiction novel that explores the perils of immortality. He blogs about coding, writing, and technology at http://nickcoding.com and his twitter account is @nickcoding. Feel free to e-mail him at nick at primordia dot com if you have any questions about this article, or any question at all.
Chair & Pen publishes stories on the writing process and the writing life. It is edited and curated by Writing Coach Annalisa Parent. To learn more about how to work with Annalisa, visit www.DateWithTheMuse.com
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