Back up your work!

Brian G Turner

Brian G Turner

Fantasist & Futurist
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Just a friendly reminder to everyone to back up your work to avoid losing it in a harddrive failure or catastrophic fire.

Aside to normal backup methods, I'm now emailing latest drafts to my free Gmail account. Not only does it mean I can download the latest draft to work on from any computer, it also means I have a protected backed up copy. My home could burn down, but my writing would be safe, which is the most important thing!

Just FYI.
 
Ive done that to AOL for years. Sent them as Word attachments. I had a look at some old emails the other day. When I clicked on document I got error code.

I have always checked these, so I was wondering what happened. All my latest are fine
 
Mine are all stored in the databanks of Leicester University. But yes, backing up can never be stressed enough. People can and do lose entire novels sometimes, and there's little that can be done once it's happened.
 
I would like to add that you should double check your back ups before doing anything like reformatting a computer. I once lost a whole lot of data because a backup didn't work properly and I hadn't realised.
 
I tend to use dropbox so I can update my work on both laptop and main computer depending on which I am using.
 
good advice indeed.

As the saying goes "There are two types,.. those who have lost data and those who are about to."

I like to keep everything close a hand. A small USB flash stick (password protected) on my key chain, is great for that.
 
I've had USB thumb-drives and SD cards die without reason. I've also had twin hard-drives 'graunch' to a halt, shredding tracks and content.

FWIW, I've given up on Word(TM) and its bloated files, save incrementaly as plain-text. The 'gotcha' is that Notepad becomes unstable if file-size exceeds ~100kB. Happily that initially shows as weird 'flow' formatting, giving time to save the file and start afresh...
 
I'm pretty full on about it, having learnt a hard lesson a number of years ago, when I lost about 100 pages. You can't rewrite what you've already written without it sounding forced (at least I can't), so I had to basically rework the plot so that completely different things happened.

I work mostly on usb, but constantly use gmail as storage, my work pc, my laptop, and burn everything onto cd every three months.
 
Well, my laptop currently smells like burning so I've just uploaded everything to an online storage place called adrive. Seems quite good.
 
Mouse, the laptop tends to last longer if you don't try to grill cheese on it.
 
Just in case, does anyone know what the copyright/ownership implications to uploading writing to things like Google are (or whether there are any)?
 
I send big documents to my gmail as well (and 2 USB sticks) , but like Gary, I wonder about how recoverable the older ones are. In my mind, it's only to be used as a last resort.
 
All this talk of memory sticks and emailing copies to yourself... the way forward is Google Docs, people! If you have a Gmail account then you'll already have access to this. It's a Word processor that lives on the Web, so wherever you are, you can always access it.

It changed the way I work completely. Try it.
 
I use an external hard drive and a couple of memory sticks, but I also back files up to my mobile phone. Can't read them on there, but safely stored if I need to travel.

Internet storage is out of the question. My connection is unreliable at present and until I can find a different and better ISP, it's going to stay that way.
 
I've used Google docs for collaborative editing and would recommend it. Haven't used it for storage yet but might give it a go.
 
Cam, no. I'd rather keep my stuff on media I control than put it up on Google's servers, thanks.
 
Just my 2 cents but a combination of hard media and cloud. Hard media can be misplaced and the cloud. . . well you can have trouble accessing to upload your work or your connection can be hit and miss thus corrupting it. I know this last from personal experience.

The end of this last term I didn't get any (Personal) writing done due to some personal issues and a death in the family but I did loose a grand total of 6 term papers due to my ISP laying new fiber optic and messing with the coaxil. Everything looked like it was uploading to my cloud services just fine, e-mails "sent" and so on so forth. However when I went to check my accounts later and finally went to class and talked to professors they had never received any communication or attached papers from me. I also misplaced my thumbdrive and external HHD in the finals week rush so had to rewrite all 6 papers from memory the night before each test.

So short and sweet: Make like a stockbroker and diversify!
 
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