How To Avoid Losing Your Work
Filed under General • 17-09-2009 •
A friend of mine lost an entire short story when his computer crashed. The story represented three months of hard work and in the blink of an eye, it was lost forever, along with all the accompanying notes. Can you imagine how frustrating that was? My friend was absolutely gutted. But it could easily have been worse. He could have lost everything he’d ever written, including the novel he’d been hammering away at for over five years. The reason he managed to salvage the majority of his work is that he had it backed-up onto disc. He just hadn’t got around to backing-up the story he was working on. Personally, I back-up everything I write. Whenever I close the document I’m working on, I make sure it’s been saved on the computer’s hard drive and copied onto the 2GB memory stick I carry around with me. If the house burns down or the computer catches a virus, I want to be sure I’ve saved all my work somewhere it can be recovered.
Tags: Writing
I’ve been using Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com), which is an online backup and versioning system. To be fair, the main reason I use it is for synching between various computers, and the backup is cherry on the cake. But I love it: it’s convenient, works quietly in the background, and I don’t ever have to worry about losing stuff (as long as I have an Internet connection).
(I used to do the memory stick thing too, but was doing it way too irregularly for it to be worthwhile).
I just use online apps like Google Docs and Office Live. I never lose more than a few minutes worth of work.
The stuff I do have locally, I still backup online using a online service.
Those both sound like good suggestions.