Don’t Be Jo
Have backups, of course, but also know how to use them.
If you saw Little Women, Greta Gerwig’s big screen adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, then as one writer to another I bet that a particular scene stuck out. Not the passing of poor [oops — no spoilers!], and not [my lips are sealed!]’s plunge into the frozen lake. What made you clutch your popcorn, I betcha, was when — okay, it was Amy — burns Jo’s manuscript.
Needless to say, Little Women is set in the Civil War, that is, in the Dark Ages before cloud storage, memory sticks, and CD-ROMs. Yes, before even copy machines.
In other words, Jo had no backup.
Moreover, Jo never saw that particular disaster coming. She probably accepted that she would lose her manuscript in a house fire or similar calamity. But her own sister deliberately setting fire to years of effort? In the loving, close-knit March household, guarding against a spiteful sibling was no more on Jo’s radar than the moon eyes Freddie Bhaer was making at her.
Which brings me to my topic: Most of us by now have some sort of backup method for our writing projects, but have you practiced recovering work from your archive? Is your recovery plan robust enough to see you through a disaster that you don’t see coming?
Perhaps you’re a crusty old computer geek, a member of that dying breed who manually copies their work onto magnetic tape or floppy disk. Or maybe your safety net is more up-to-date and simply consists of regularly emailing yourself the latest version of your work in progress. (I don’t recommend either backup strategy, by the way, but my purpose here isn’t to scold. You do you, but make sure you do something!) How you protect your work doesn’t matter as much as what you plan to do when you need to recover it, and whether you can confidently execute your plan in the midst of a disaster, when you may have a million other things on your mind.
You may well be the very model of a modern major creative, taking full advantage of today’s backup-and-restore solutions— such as Apple’s popular Time Machine, Carbonite’s industry-leading technology, Dropbox’s friendly file synchronization tool, or some other, possibly superior cloud storage and recovery service. But here, too, it’s incumbent on you to be familiar with how your chosen tech works end-to-end. When you’re unexpectedly separated from your work, getting it back efficiently requires that you have practiced the procedure at least once beforehand, in rehearsal, and ideally many times.
Having a safety net to catch you when you fall is no help when you discover, on the way down, that the net is locked in a closet or it has a gaping hole right under you.
Rehearsing for disaster is vital for a couple of reasons. First, that’s how you discover flaws in your strategy: perhaps you’ll find that to access your online backups you need a password that’s stored in your laptop, which you’ve forgotten, so if the laptop were stolen you’d be locked out. If you’re assuming that you’d just reset the password in that case, your reasoning is faulty because you’d be making your disaster recovery plan dependent on recovering the password. A single point of failure is the Achilles’s heel of all disaster recovery plans. A primary goal of rehearsal is to find and eliminate as many single points of failure as possible, and to take careful note of the ones that don’t have a workaround.
Another reason for practicing your recovery plan is to gain confidence, which will help you stay calm and make good decisions under stress. It’s well known that panic is potentially as dangerous as the emergency itself. For example, initiating a full system restore when only a file or folder was accidentally lost — a panic move — very likely will have knock-on effects on other writing projects, applications, and so on. Having previously rehearsed the specific task of file recovery, however, will make it easier to make a calmer, wiser choice.
Rehearsal will pay off even more when the unexpected happens: when a squirrel chews through the power cord on your home computer, frying both machine and beast, on the same day that your laptop falls into a lake; when a hacker breaches your email provider’s defenses and deletes every copy of every project you ever mailed to yourself, shortly before a tree lands on your house, causing no bodily harm (thank goodness) but taking weird aim at your computer room. Trouble comes in threes, as the saying goes, and life has a way of taking odd turns, but having practiced your recovery plan and gained confidence in your ability to snap back, you’ll have the know-how to address disasters you can’t foresee.
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
Try this: Leave your computer and phone at home and walk into a branch of your public library that has computers for public use. Verify with the librarian that the machines are digitally and physically sanitized before each patron’s use. Now, get comfy and download your current project. What obstacles did you encounter on the way? What additional steps would you have to take to view and edit the project? Take notes on your experience to streamline the process next time.
(I’m writing this in the US during the national shutdown over the coronavirus pandemic, and I realize it will be a while before public libraries reopen. In the meantime, an alternative to consider is to rent a virtual PC, a personal computer hosted remotely that’s accessed through an Internet browser.)
Or this: If you store your backups on physical media rather than an online archive, grab your latest backup and play out the scenario in which your existing hardware is rendered unusable (by fire, flood, theft, whatever). As above, take notes on the steps necessary to recover your latest project. Then document what’s necessary to view and edit the work as well.
Of course, outright destruction of your entire computing system is an extreme situation. Take a little time to come up with disaster scenarios that fit your particular situation, not neglecting prosaic cases like accidental file deletion. The more independent ways that you exercise your recovery plan, the stronger will be your ability to respond in an actual crisis. Keep the following cardinal rule in mind, however:
No destructive testing. Do not test your recovery plan by creating an actual crisis, for instance by renaming or moving your project to a different computer folder. Leave your working environment alone.
The rule against destructive testing can make coming up with realistic cases more challenging, but it’s important nonetheless. Never put your system at risk from a misstep or oversight caused by a test.
Casting Back, Looking Ahead
Jo March had none of the protections that we take nearly for granted today. She didn’t have the luxury of rehearsing a recovery plan or plugging single points of failure. We have it over her in another respect, too. Today, backup-and-restore methods are constantly evolving, becoming cheaper, easier to use, and more secure. As you become more adept at recovering your work, keep an eye open for how you could do it better. Are there features of your current solution that you’re not taking advantage of, such as scheduled backup, web and smartphone access, and two-factor security?
Example (for Scrivener Users): You’re probably aware that Scrivener can make backups of your projects (if not, read this). In fact, a Scrivener backup might be your first and easiest line of response in a disaster, and it’s built into your favorite writing tool. But the feature will be of limited use if you’re unsure how it works. Open your Scrivener backup location (you can find it in your Preferences) and see how the archive is organized. The Scrivener User Manual is an excellent guide to managing your backups and running a restore.
Example (for all of us): Did you know that you can request an archive from Medium containing every story, post, and draft you’ve written on the platform? This post by Stevie Adler (@StevieAdler) gives details. Downloading your content periodically and backing it up with your other files affords a level of safety against the day, for instance, that you delete a story accidentally.
Going further, is it time for you to make a change in your backup-and-restore practices? Just as CDs replaced vinyl recordings, which in turn have given way to music streaming, backup technologies come and go. If you’ve stuck with the same technology for more than a few years, you owe it to yourself to take some time to evaluate newer offerings. You may be able to increase your peace of mind and save yourself money and effort by adopting a newer approach.
Marmee’s Last Word
In Little Women, Jo’s mother Marmee is a font of wisdom. Louisa May Alcott gives Marmee a line that’s apt to being prepared for disaster and navigating a safe recovery: “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
