It’s like exercising regularly and eating healthy food. We all know we should do it. But sometimes we don’t.
Backup, that is.
Our books-in-progress are valuable. Don’t let yours fall victim to a hacker or computer failure.
The value of a manuscript
Good computer backups are not just for big business. Writers and editors need them too.
An earlier version of this article appeared on this site in 2013, but I’ve just completely updated it because of a conversation I had on Twitter this past week. A writer was terrified that she might have lost her whole manuscript due to a file corruption. I had a small panic attack on her behalf, waiting to hear the news. Thankfully, her story ended well and her manuscript was safe.
Some of these stories didn’t end so well:
- Literary agent Rachelle Gardner blogged about a client whose “computer had crashed and died; his external backup was corrupted. His manuscript—the one he’d been writing for months—was due to the publisher in a couple of weeks. And it was GONE.” The poor writer waited anxious weeks, paid a great deal of money, and – thankfully – eventually regained a messy, incomplete version of his manuscript.
- Novelist Mat Johnson lost the first 100 pages of his novel when his computer hard disk died, and his online backup wasn’t functioning because he had failed to noticed the “update your credit card details” emails the service had sent.
- This article on The Write Life tells of a writer who lost every short story, script and book chapter they’d ever written.
The horror story that finally got me to act
I used to be a little haphazard in my backups. Sure, I had an external hard drive or USB sticks, but I felt uneasy.
Then, in August 2012, I read the story of technology journalist Mat Honan, who fell victim to a malicious hacker, and not only lost his important work on his laptop but saw his digital life stolen before his eyes.
The hacker wiped his devices clean, including all the photos of his baby daughter.
And even though he was a techy person, Mat’s laptop wasn’t backed up.
His story hit me between the eyes. Those baby photos!
“Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook,” he wrote, “I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.”
Some of Mat’s computer was gone forever, but thankfully, specialists were able to recover the photos of his baby girl’s birth and first year at a cost of nearly $1700.
If a techy person can neglect to backup for a year, there’s no shame in it for the rest of us, and I finally took action to create more reliable backups for my work.
Don’t be embarrassed if you haven’t done it yet. Please just do something about it now.
The Rule of Three
Please note that several of the horror stories above involved people who had backups but those backups failed for one reason or another.
We must have redundancy in our backups.
Also, at least one of our backups, and hopefully two, is not in the same building as the computer, so that we are covered in case of theft, fire, flood, etc.
This is my backup set.
1. An external hard drive on my desk
I bought an external hard drive, connected it to my computer, and each hour it backs up every single file that has changed since the last time it looked. I like having this backup in-house, because it’s the quickest one to access when a file becomes corrupt or accidentally overwritten.
- I work on Mac and use a utility called Time Machine. All I have to do is navigate to the corrupted file in my Finder, then click Time Machine in the Dock, and it will immediately unroll backwards, showing me all the previous versions of that file that are still available from past hours, days or weeks. Here’s how to set up a Time Machine, if you’re on Mac.
- If you are on PC, here’s how to use the Backup utility in Windows 10.
2. A paid backup in the cloud
Because I have a lot of photos and videos as well as large publishing files, I use Crashplan for Small Business, which gives me unlimited backup at about $10 per month per device. I have about 700 GB on there right now!
If you don’t need such a large capacity, there are cheaper options. Here’s a 2018 review of the best online backup services, showing the different capabilities and pricing.
3. A free backup in the cloud
I also have a free Dropbox account, which is another kind of cloud backup that only holds 2 or 3 GB. (They offer larger backups for a fee.)
I have a folder on my computer called Dropbox, and this particular folder is constantly being backed up to this particular service. When I’m working on something important (my own books or my current client projects), I just shift it into the Dropbox folder, where it stays until the project is complete. Then I move it out again, to make room for new projects.
Dropbox is also useful when I shift from my desktop computer to my laptop – I synchronise the Dropbox on both machines, and the laptop then has the latest changes to my current files.
This means my most crucial current files are backing up to my external hard drive, my Crashplan account, and my Dropbox — simultaneously and automatically.
Special situations
When I’m working away from home and have no internet connection, I save my important files to USB sticks – the same file to three or four different USB sticks, as they are prone to failure and corruption.
When I’m working away from home with a slow or limited internet connection that can’t support my usual constant cloud backups, I email my important files to myself. That way there is a copy not only on my computer when I get home, but in the email server, which is effectively a low-tech cloud backup.
If you don’t have an off-site backup yet, a very quick way to at least get started is to go somewhere such as gmail.com, set up a free email address, and email your manuscript to yourself at the gmail address at the end of each writing session. You can do this one right now, today, if you don’t yet have cloud backup.
If you write in Scrivener, I suggest exporting your manuscript to a Word doc before emailing it, as it is a smaller file.
If you lose your manuscript or your computer, you can login to your gmail account through an internet browser, and sort through the past emails to find the most recent copy.
An extra layer for Scrivener users
I write my books in Scrivener, and as mentioned, the main file remains in my Dropbox until the book is finished and published.
However, Scrivener itself has the option of a further layer of automated backup. Go to Scrivener > Preferences > Backup to choose your options.
Mine is set to backup the entire project to a folder called Scrivener Backup that I’ve created elsewhere on my computer. It saves a copy of the whole project there each time I close Scrivener… and it keeps the last 5 copies. I currently have 6 or 7 live projects running in Scrivener, and it saves the last 5 copies of every single one of them, totalling 35 documents!
My Scrivener projects contain lots of photos, audio interviews, web pages, pdfs, and other kinds of research – so they can be quite large and complex.
If this complex Scrivener file somehow becomes corrupted or overwritten – which has happened to me! – I can switch back to the complete, uncorrupted version I was working on yesterday or the day before, and lose only a small amount of work.
These extra backups are then, of course, backed up to my external hard drive, and my Crashplan backup.
What is your experience? Ever lost your work?
What backups are you currently running? Tell us what you’ve found to be good.
(Image via Bigstock/PixBox)
I’m not a big fan of autosyncing to the cloud. While it’s quite useful if one works on multiple computers, it can be a real PIA for anyone who doesn’t truly understand the technology. I’ve had friends over-write files because they didn’t realize the sync would be pulling down versions from the cloud. I had one friend turn off OneDrive because she kept losing things or overwriting things.
I use an external Seagate slim drive once a week – that backs up to the physical drive and to the cloud. But I am in full control. I set a reminder on my phone and just plug it in. I need one more remote method and a regular daily method, so am working on that.
I’ve actually had some trouble with Scrivener versions when syncing between two computers via Dropbox, so I understand what you’re thinking about that. I do like it though because it’s so easy to access my current work from anyone’s computer if mine suddenly goes down. Hope you find a good solution for remote backup.
I live in earthquake country, so I have a jump-kit by my bed with necessities, including my go-everywhere everyday fanny pack which has my wallet, keys, cellphone, and a flashdrive with my book and other books or pieces in progress. This never leaves me, and does not go into any other computers, I also keep a separate external hard drive and have Time Machine. I agree with all of your advice except cloud and gmail. You expose yourself to all manner of plagiarism, global spammers, and other mischief by putting ANYTHING important on any “cloud” because you are offering it to every hacker on earth. Google and gmail are notorious for storing and keeping all of your personal information in places unknown to you, which you cannot delete. After you think you have deleted anything on gmail, it goes to another storage place you cannot access. When I moved a gmail account to my desktop email client, suddenly some 6.000 emails appeared, 300 or 400 a day, which I had deleted over nearly 10 years. When I deleted them from my desktop mail, they all came back the next day, And more days for a few days until I discovered what they were doing. There is a long, 5-step process required to fully delete any gmail, which you must search out (too long to say here).. Beware of FREE email accounts or websites. You can get protected email addresses from a number of paid providers. I use Earthlink. for $5 a month I get 2 well-filtered and reliable addresses, and I have quite a few others thru my web-hosting (Bravenet). If you know someone with a website, they can probably give you a free email on their site domain, either as a box or a forwarder, Watch out for Google and Cloud. They are quicksand – easy to fall into but extremely hard to get out of. Get one free address to use for internet to avoid massive spam and use it to minimize spambots from harvesting your real email addresses.
Thanks Victoria! I’m glad you take such good care of your books. I know what you mean about cloud services, and it’s probably true that there are many organisations that know much more about us than we’d really like.
This post brought up so many bad memories…and a good one! I learned the hard lesson early. I was typing a screenplay on my sister’s Kaypro — yeah, we’re talking 1984 — when I accidentally hit some unknown button and deleted the first thirty pages. There was no “undo” in those days. The good news was I could rewrite it, and the second version was better. Lesson learned.
Destruction can come from surprising sources. Years later, I bought a larger internal hard drive for my desktop computer, but the tech guys at the large national chain store where I bought the drive and had it installed inexplicably used the old cable. That caused the larger capacity hard drive to fail six months later, taking everything with it, including thousands of photos. I was actually in the process of organizing the photos to back them up “efficiently” when this happened, so they were lost forever. The hard lesson that day: back up first, organize later.
But I did learn! Some years after that, I was working as a temp on a long-term real estate project at a job site. That meant no network, no tech support, just the super-antiquated PC the project owner had dumped on us. This PC was so old that it had none of those new-fangled USBs, no functional disk drives, and no writable CD drive. All I had was email. One day, about six months into the project, the computer completely blanked out for four seconds, then unsteadily blinked back to life. Somehow, magically, I knew that meant the hard drive was about to fail. I tried to impress on my boss Kathy the impending emergency, but she was a Realtor and knew nothing about computers. With no other way to back up the hundreds of files, I told her I would be emailing all the files to her with a specific numbered email subject line, and she was NOT to touch them. She agreed. Four days later, the hard drive gave up the ghost. My boss called the tech support guy, and when he came out I explained to him the whole story. Kathy told him just to fix it, and he said, “This hard drive is metal shavings. Everything is gone.” Kathy reeled, and then, bless him, he said to her, “By emailing you everything, Melinda saved the project.” I didn’t get to be “Temp of the Month,” but I did make lifelong friends.
I write my novels with my thumb drive as my primary file so I can wander from computer to computer, but, at the end of each writing session, I copy my updated files to that computer’s hard drive, One Drive, Dropbox, and, if the computer has an external hard drive, that as well. Thank you for the reminder to email copies of my current novels every single day. After all, these are my babies — I can’t be too careful!
Omigosh, Melinda. Those stories! They make my hair catch fire, just a little bit. I recall the bad old days in the 90s when I was living in a residential college, and floppy disks were what we stored our essays on. Lots of computers still didn’t even have hard drives. I still recall the blood-curdling scream that echoed down the corridors one night when one of the women inserted a disk into a computer and there was nothing on it. It had failed – the night before her essay was due!
What a champion you were to save that real estate project! Well done!!! Sounds like you were Temp of the Year, to me.
And great that you are so careful with your manuscripts. Experience has taught you some very useful things. 🙂
You’re one of those magical people who knows why a hard drive is the C drive and not A or B! (And I can hear that scream. )
I had a “compact computer” about the size of a small suitcase, which had two floppy disk drives – one to hold the program disk, and one to hold my files. Haha, those were the days. (How old am I???)
I can top that. I had a Radio Shack computer that used cassette tapes to store files. We’re talking maybe 1983/4. I was working on a term paper for college and a guy came to do some electrical work. I told sure and went back to working. Seconds later, everything in the apartment powered off. Oops…I didn’t know enough then to know he would be shutting off the power. I also didn’t know enough to know to save regularly. No print out…had to start over from scratch. Now, I’m a religious saver and backup nerd.
Omigosh. Horrific! The tools we use might be more sophisticated these days, but the loss is still horrendous. Glad you got your paper submitted, eventually. 🙂
Belinda,
I found your article through a Google search on backups for writers, thus the late chime-in.
Have you looked at LastPass for your passwords? I love it and I’m slowly getting rid of my duplicates. There’s even a password update feature, which updates your password on a site ‘automagically’.
I work at my desk 95% of the time. But there’s that 5% where I need to work from my laptop and I want to be able to keep my work up-to-date, without a lot of hair-pulling. I was using SyncToy to keep a back-up on a thumb-drive before. Now, I’m debating having my ‘live’ directory on a thumb drive. Then, it doesn’t matter if I’m working on my laptop or my PC, I’ll have the current copy right there. If that’s what I do, I’m thinking of setting up SyncToy on both PC and laptop, then each computer will have a ‘backup’ of my work.
I’m not sold (yet) on having a backup in the cloud. I felt scattered, having it spread across just 2 computers, plus all my paper notes (no idea what to do there!). I like the idea of the ‘live’ copy always being with me. I may even install Scrivener on the thumb-drive, if that’s possible. Then I could work at any computer. 🙂
Thanks for talking about this. It’s good to hear the potential problems I’m courting by burying my head in the sand.
Anne.
This “party” is ongoing, Anne, so late arrivals are always welcome. 🙂
And it’s so important that we back up our work. It’s precious! I always get alarmed when I hear of writers who have a huge manuscript underway and no backup whatsoever. Glad you are thinking about that.
A handy thing about my Dropbox backup is that as soon as I power up my laptop, so long as I’ve got an internet connection, within a couple of minutes my latest work is all on it. I realise that has limitations if you don’t normally work with internet connection, or if you’re working somewhere for the day that you don’t trust the wifi. Don’t forget that thumb drives fail too, so do always keep a copy in other places as well as the thumb drive. 🙂 Best wishes for your writing!
i was attacked by a ransomware virus. It came in through my pc, traveled up into the cloud and down into my laptop. It corrupted everything. The only things that survived were those I had emailed to myself. So now I have multiple email addresses that I cc with my work regularly. he really important stuff I also keep in paper copy.
That is so awful, Regina. I used to email stuff to myself, and I might start doing it again, given your experience!!
SugarSync is another very good option for backing up your data and it will automatically synchronize any changes to all of your devices.
Thanks Eric. I’ve used SugarSync too in the past, and one of the handy things about it was that you didn’t have to move everything to a Dropbox folder – you could sync whichever computer folders you wanted.
Okay, just backed up my family pictures to a third place. So writing and pictures in two different external drives and one internal drive. Thanks for the reminder. I’m still checking out cloud. I like tangible locations.
Elldee
Elldee, it took me ages to finally commit to cloud, especially paid cloud. It was the issue of the photos that did it for me in the end. I have so many from all my travels etc (100GB or more) and would hate to lose them. A year of unlimited Crashplan+ was cheaper than buying another external hard drive, so I took the leap.
But there are heaps of free options for people who have smaller amounts to backup, like the free Dropbox account I have. Some people criticise Dropbox for various reasons, but I’ve found it OK so far. Nothing’s perfect, I guess!
I also use Dropbox as a backup when I’m taking design files to a client’s office on a USB stick. If the USB stick fails on me, I can still access the files from my Dropbox, remotely, and get the client what they need. What we need depends on the way we work. 🙂
Such good advice 🙂
Many years ago, back in the days of floppy discs (!) a friend lost 60K words of a novel when her computer crashed. I determined to back up my own in future, but still found myself forgetting to do it except once in a while, probably every couple of weeks.
I became more committed when I got a book deal, as I couldn’t afford to have to re-write, but nowadays I use a cloud backup – Livedrive – which backs up as I work. Provided I am online, it backs up constantly, so unless their server has a major problem, my stuff is there, and available to share between my laptops at the click of a button.
I’ve not long started blogging, and you are the second person to advise backing that up – so that’s my next priority.
Thanks again for sharing 🙂
Of course it would be better if I got my blog address right – oops!
Haha Deborah – are you commenting late at night again? 😉
But of course!
The witching hour is almost upon me and I feel myself turning into a pumpkin…
Hi Deborah, I remember the days of floppy disks too! And if you were borrowing someone else’s computer, the floppy copy might be all you had, because not everyone could afford a computer back then (hard to imagine now). I still remember the howl of horror that echoed down the halls of the college I was living in back in the 90s… some poor girl had had her entire university essay disappear from her floppy disk. Weeks of research, and due the next day.
We have so many more options for backup now, but we get very lazy about it. (and I do mean WE, including ME! 😉 ) The backups that are constantly updated to the web are good. My Crashplan and Dropbox do that.
Thanks for stopping to chat. 🙂