I know the subject of backing up is terrible. It isn’t actually about making your writing better. It’s a technical voodoo most writers tend to ignore. Those who mention backing up find others saying something like, “I should do this more often. I haven’t backed up in a month.”
I was taught to back up when I started writing by an IT professional named Chrys Thorsen. How good is she? Chrys is a network administrator and network security expert for the White House in Washington D.C. I’m about to pass what she taught on to you. I’ll start with my own back up story.
Why Backing Up Is Important
In 2004 I began writing my first paranormal romance. I finished the first draft mid-2005. Then, life got in the way. Over the next 14 years I dabbled, not knowing how to revise. It took until 2018, when someone mentored me, for revision to begin in earnest. This was a lot of work, grinding away, self-learning how to adapt a role play into a novel. Some things were irreplaceable.
In 2019 I was partway through the revision. It was a printed manuscript. I was hand writing in the changes. I ended up in the hospital getting my legs amputated, which put me away from my home for ten and one half months.
Four months into that, my house caught fire.
My manuscript was locked away inside a boarded up house. When I’d decided I had recovered enough of my brain to tackle my novel again, I still had no access to the paper version. I didn’t even know if it survived. Not having a replacement computer yet, I discovered Scrivener for iPhone. Now all I needed was a copy of my manuscript that was as up to date as possible.
Luckily, I’d backed up to several sources.
I checked iCloud. I only had partials, or files were corrupt. Same thing for my thumb stick—partials or corrupted files. I looked in my Gmail and Yahoo-- Partials only. Not even a full copy between them.
I knew the room with the paper copy was not fire damaged. I trusted I might still get someone to collect it for me. If it didn’t exist? Well, I could never have recreated some things in exactly the same way. I felt ill thinking I had maybe lost all that work after fourteen years. Still, I decided to go forward with the follow up novel.
When I set up Scrivener for iPhone it connected to my forgotten account on Dropbox. Thank all the gods in the sky for Dropbox! There on Dropbox was a full manuscript.
The only reason I had a good copy of it? I followed Chrys Thorsen’s instructions, backing up in several places with several instances of my files. Obviously, I’d neglected the practice or I wouldn’t have so many partial and corrupted files. Despite my lack of attention to the lessons, I still had one copy of my hard work to go off of. So, what did Chrys teach me?
The Process Of Backing Up
No. 1: Save Incrementally And Frequently
My first contact with writers amazed me at how many do not save as they go while writing. Saving is important just to be certain your changes don’t get wiped out by Electronic Gods with a power surge or sudden shut down from overheating—or the dreaded Blue Screen—losing what hasn’t been saved. It’s actually fairly simple. While it only takes a second of time, I am surprised at how easy it is to simply ignore the process of saving, let alone backing up. Incremental saves and back ups are key to this process. Many people have had hard drive failure right in the middle of writing. They have gone hours without saving incrementally. So hit Save regularly as you go.
No. 2: Back Up To At Least A Second And Third Source
Hitting Ctrl-S saves your work to one particular location. However, redundancy and differing locations are your friend when it comes to backing up. At the end of each writing session backing up should be a habit. This is what Chrys taught me. I say ‘should’ because even I’m guilty of not doing it one-hundred percent. Which is foolish considering what I’ve been through. However I do strive to back up as much often as possible.
The point of a back up is so that you only lose a portion of your work, not all of it. In the 80s, Bank of America lost eight hours worth of financial transactions for all of their clients. That was eight hours in one day. Banks, at the time, only backed up at the end of the business day. You better believe the Federal Government said, “We better start banks doing incremental back ups during the day going forward.” And yes that was quite a disaster. How precious is your blood sweat and tears over your writing? Can you put a monetary value on your time?
What counts as a source? Anything which isn’t your computer’s hard drive. Any of the following will do:
- A stand alone secondary hard drive.
- A memory stick
- An SD or microSD card
- CD re-writeable
- DVD re-writeable
- Webmail, such as Gmail or Yahoo!
- Cloud service like Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox or OneDrive
- Smartphone, tablet or similar which has storage capabilities
There are also back up services. These will take an image of your entire hard drive. It’s still a back up, but for some it may be overkill. Used more often by businesses to save sensitive information, these do take a little more time, though not as much as trying to recreate that trilogy. ;) However, the cost is more than a cloud server and may be beyond your budget..
How about that website you pay money for? This is not recommended by reason of traditional publishing. If you want your story accepted by a traditional publisher, they usually ask if it’s been published anywhere else. If your story is on the web where someone could view it without having to log in, many publishers consider that to be publishing—even if there’s no link to the story anywhere. They have for over fifteen years. This is why CC doesn’t threaten your ability to publish—a log in is required. If you have a way to password protect the file, then that would work. Otherwise, don’t use your website as a back up source.
What about if I just print out a copy and have that around? Actually, Chrys had an answer for this, too. Yes, a print out is a back up. But, because of the way disasters occur, protecting your manuscript by backing it up as a hardcopy would be to store it—I’m not making this up-=-30 miles away in a different location from where you live. That sounds like quite a hassle to me, especially if you write every single day. However, it’s the recommended distance to make sure that if the disaster happened in your area it would be unlikely to effect the area where your hard copy back up lives. Think this sounds excessive? Next time there’s a flood, wildfire, twister, hurricane or earthquake, look at the scope of the damage. Covers a lot of acreage, doesn’t it?
No. 3: Add The Date To The File Name
You’re backing up daily. But which file is which? Confusion is easily solved. When you save all your work at the end of the day, save a new file with the date in the name. Say I’m working on Lady Saffron on 1 August 2021. At the end of the day I’d save it with this name:
LadySaffron20210801
When I save at the end of 2 August it’s LadySaffron20210802. You get the gist. This way you can tell the date of the last time you worked the project. If you find something missing—like I recently found a whole scene in Scrivener with no words in it—you can go back and find your previous day’s work and restore it.
How many instances should you keep? Seven is sufficient. Periodically go through your back ups and purge the ones that are beyond that.
One More Thing…
I should also mention something about file format. Scrivner is my preferred writing program now. When I started writing I used a PC only program called Write Way Pro. Chrys insisted I save everything in .RTF. This preserves formatting, with the added bonus of being read by virtually any text type word processor. Also, .RTF is not subject to computer viruses. Although not all viruses are geared this way, many are aimed at files ending in .EXE, .DOC/X and .XLS/X.
Sound like a hassle? So is losing your work forever. Chrys calls it Catastrophic Data Loss. You can avoid this, too, and far more easily. Just remember the steps.
To list it all again:
- Save regularly while you’re writing.
- Save the file with the date in the name of the file to .RTF format
- Save the file again (this can be copy and paste of the newly saved file) to at least two more sources, one preferably portable, if not remote. Again please use the naming convention with the date and the title.
- If saving to webmail, put the subject as Back Up MyNovelThisYearThisMonthThisDay
- Keep seven of the last instances, purging the ones beyond that periodically
- Lather, rinse, repeat every time you write.. Period. End of sentence.
Back up early. Back up often. Make sure that the date is on each daily save you make. Keep seven instances of your last daily saves. This saved me. It can save you.
Peace of mind is a beautiful thing. And now, knowing where all my pieces are and knowing that I’ve taken care to be certain what happened to me and other authors never happens again, I feel confident and competent in my ability to protect my hard work. Catastrophic Data Loss is a thing. It’s preventable with a minimum of fuss. If you don’t think it will happen to you, I can only say this: Neither did I.