The Wood Beyond The World Forum Backing up our Work

Ok, gang.

This posting is not to make anyone feel bad or stupid. I am sure we have all lost more work than Stephen King has ever produced.

Recently, one of our members lost work on a off site back up file saver called Xdrive. I have heard of it, but know nothing about it. This got me to wondering. As serious as we have taken all our work, all of our posted topic's, how serious do we take saving and securing our work? How serious are we at protecting our babies?

Me, I have two computers, one is only used for my writing, my home forms and work forms, no other programs for games, etc, no internet connections. This is my secure system. It can not be hacked from the outside unless I transfer a corrupted file to it.

But...that has happened in the past as well. So, I also have an external hard drive that I use for all my file savings, pictures, artwork, home forms, work forms, and of course, my writings. I only turn this external hard drive on when I want to transfer work for saving, either computer. Maybe twice a week. Both my computers run the same operating systems and are set up with MS office 2006, professional.

My second computer, I transfer my files via memory stick, usually after saving on my #1 computer and then transfering to my #2 computer for uploading. I have also saved each version of each work on a seperate CD rom. My earlier versions are also on a zip disk and that older computer with the zip drive is my back up if any of these crash. Can you say paranoid? Well, after losing several works from hard drive crashers, worms, viruses, etc, then yes, I am paranoid. Lose my IRS stuff, but not my writing.

Anyone else have other systems they use to make sure we do not lose our work? Are off site file saving systems worth it? The only advantage I can think of is that they are accessable from any computer. But then, you still have to be runing the same word processing program. I personally like my memory stick. It can go to work with me and back home again, or to my GF's house, sisters house, etc. lol.

Nick.

Generally I keep a copy on my laptop and my home computer. This home computer is mine personally, my wife, daughter and son each have one they can use. So I figured my work was safe. However, transfer of files became an issue when I'd write at work or at a hotel on my laptop and then again at home on my desktop. So I would just started to keep my laptop on at home.

Then I stumbled across XDrive (through AOL), but instead of downloading the file and working on it then uploading, I again grew lazy and just started to keep the files there and periodically download the directory to one or both of my machines for safe keeping. Well, low and behold I have not done this for over a week. Again my life got busy with work and my Step-Father and things slip.

So today I sat and wrote a bit, on a vacation day, well waiting results from my mom on step-dad's surgery. I connected to XDrive (it has software that causes it to become a shared drive) and began working. Well the storms hit, I figured I'd save and call it a day. Well, no connection, Word froze and could not save (no internet), when I tried to save on my local disk, I got jibberish. It seems that Word lost all that was orginally written and only retained what was done today. So in between all the odd Y's there was text of which I either changed or added. Okay, so working off of Xdrive only gave me an image and NEVER STORED ANY IN MY MEMORY. Lessoned learned. What happened to the orginal on Xdrive? I don't know.. It's gone.

Suggestion: Use a program like Xdrive for storage and unique ability to get info from multiple locations as it was intended, a backup, not a working copy.

Also, I will now use the USB Flash drive to carry all work from this point forward, in the event there is no internet connection. I wish I would have gone camping this weekend for I would have download the new works to the laptop....

Again...Lessoned Learned the hard way. At least it was only one chapter, but it was brilliant. But now will never know. ::sad::

I keep a hard copy outline of everything I write, have it saved to my pc and on a flashdrive (in the past I used floppy's). Used to print it out periodically but the paper and ink was getting prohibitive.

When you re-write it, Michael, it could be even more brilliant, though.

Now that I'm revising chapters all over the place I have to remember which version is which, be very careful what I name the file, etc. I thought I'd lost the last chapter I revised for TM, but all I'd done was forget to give it the right name -- I slept on it, and remembered how to look for it. But I was fully prepared to do the re-write.

I've got a pretty good short-term memory for what I write myself -- I read and re-read almost every sentence as I'm working, so if the worst happens, and I'm quick enough, I can get it back directly from my brain -- mostly. And I'll trust that any changes I make will be improvements. If anything was all that brilliant, I'll surely remember it, I tell myself.

The Luddite here is stepping out of his carriage, patting his horse and pulling out his pieces of paper.

I am constantly printing things out, damn the cost of paper and ink. A couple of years ago, before having a burner, I lost 6 months of work when my hard disc decided to up and die. This wasn't just story stuff I lost but also research material. But I had a hard copy so I only lost a couple of weeks of stuff.

Yes, re-entering the stuff was tedious, but it allowed me an extra level of edit improving some stuff.

For me, I once a month burn a DVD of my hard disc. It is not just the writing. I have written programs to calculate the positions of the moons and sun in my system, keep track of family trees, generate calendars, calculate distances on my maps. This way if my system goes nuclear, I don't lose much.

And just so you know, this Luddite does recycle constantly. So as new chapters are printed, I recycle the old ones. The other critical thing, which is never recycled is the first drafts of all of my new stuff.

As an extra layer of security, unlike many of you young pups, I write long hand. I am not into this laptop crap or writing using online storage. Writing long hand means I can write at work, on the bus or subway, at my pub, etc. etc. If I lose an electronic copy, I still have the original. And it gives me a first pass of edit on my ideas when I type it it. So in the end, I have never lost anything important. Old tech still has it advantages.

Nobody has yet mentioned one very important backup: What if your house burns down? A few years ago I began keeping an updated disk with my father, just in case. Saw Kim Novak on a talk show once, she had run around with the Rat Pack regularly, wrote a full manuscript about her experiences, then had the manuscript go up in flames with her house. It was lost forever, she explained. This raised every hair on my body, and I resolved this wouldn't happen to me.

My father is 81 and just fallen into ill health. He will move in with us in a few months, and I will have to begin running that disk to the bank's lock box, as I won't dare to lose my life's work to laxity.

Everyday when work is done I save what I've done to the flash disk.

The only time I write online is when reviewing a short work, and even then I "copy" the review constantly as I add to it, then before I hit the submit button. Urbis was much worse for losing reviews than writerscafe. With copy, if the internet goes down, I can at least copy to a blank page.

I really should start storing in multiple locations as well. I can say that now that my music is portable I intend to get back to free hand writing instead of on this pc. It's just much more personal, much more focused, and I tend to play with the words more before writing it down if I use free hand instead of just rushing through it.

So far anything i've lost (though after the tragic moment has past) has been relatively crappy in comparison to the writing i produce now.

before i had my laptop, i did writing in public libraries and emailed documents to my accounts. before that it was my mother's computer that had bad memory problems.

now i have my own laptop and periodically i back up my files to a 2GB flashdrive. Plenty of room so far. :)

I use MS Word current version.

I have everything saved on 2 computers, my personal one from school and the family one that I use when i'm at home. And it helps that almost all the important stuff is posted on a website, mostly here. The only things I ever "lose" are revisions sometimes (I might click the wrong thing and instead of saving it, it just exits...maddening beyond all comprehension)

Quote:


Andy,

Been there and done that more times than I care to admit. Close out and hit no instead of save. Arggggg. Especially late at night when your eyes are having focusing problems. That really ticks me off because its no one's fault but mine. Which is why I hit the save button once an hour while working on new stuff. That way I only lose an hours worth of work.

Loekie,

I too keep all my older hand writen hard copies in a trunk. Which is also where I keep copies of my back up CD's. I still use legal pad and pencil, (old habit of never writing in pen), when traveling or other places where computers are unavailable. Its amazing when I go back and reread some of my early hand writen stuff, how much I have improved, even though those were very early and rough drafts.

Bill,

I had not thought of storing at a relatives, but it does seem needed. I do not want to lose a life time of work, be it good or bad, its still a representation of who I am. My kids love reading my stuff because they tell me they see another side of me other than DAD. Will have to consider perhaps getting another exterior hard drive and backing up and leaving it at a relatives.

Nick.

MS Office has a program (whether it is new or not i don't know) called OneNote. It functions as a sticky note, post-it note, or it is like a page in a file of a folder that you can type anywhere on the document and it creates a cell for that text, and then you can move the cells around.

The good thing, and reason why i bring it up, is it saves everything automatically. I dont mean every two minutes, i mean right away. So i use it a little more often than Word when i need to compile notes on a segment i am writing or want to write. I got a huge bunch of notes on whisper mages, names, places, things to happen, all that jazz -- never need to save any of it.

I quite like all of your methods. I like your careful precautions Bill. I don't think I would worry so much about a fire as someone breaking into the house and stealing the PC, or damaging it. But either way, its a good idea to store a back up somewhere externally.

Generally, anytime I change something I save to memory stick, but I don't have multiple ways of saving. I need to think on that.

I have to two jobs so sometimes I would email myself my latest chapter/draft, so I could access it at any job and rework it as and when and then just email it back to myself with a different version number. It worked well when my morning job was quiet because loads of ideas would come to me as well as inspiration to write. Also having it on email was handy because no matter what failure occured, I would always be able to access it from any PC with internet access (you wouldn't be able to do this with whole books tho). In the last few months we started to get busy so I don't really use that method anymore, but I think I will get a laptop just for my writing and still continue to save on memory stick and my PC.

Scribble

In the end, there is no perfect method. As to the house burning down, I had an experience where I lost tons of important notes.

A few years ago, I moved in with a friend who I didn't know know was a psychotic maniac. Things got so bad, I had to flee the townhouse with almost nothing save my hard drive. I lost notes I had from 1982 plus maps and other hand written stuff that was irreplaceable. From what I gather, she burnt them in her BBQ. On top of that I lost over $20,000 worth of stuff (like electronics, CDs, videos, hard cover books).

After that I realized there is no fool proof method for saving your stuff. But I agree with Leah 200%. At that time, Tangled Threads had hit a brick wall. It was naive and wasn't working out. Having lost a lot of important notes and chapters, I had to go back and rethink what I was doing. And because of that, I realized why it wasn't working out and the series got richer. That dark period of my life erupted into some amazing insight and ideas. Sometimes you need to lose stuff to actually improve it.