New Writers:
I am begging you, if you have any positive regard for me and my blood pressure, back up your work.
It physically hurts (right in the gut!) to hear about people losing their manuscripts because of things like floods, malware, theft, dropped devices, or infestations.
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing it by hand, using a typewriter, your phone, a laptop, your desktop computer, or a hammer and chisel on stone, please back up your work on a regular basis.
You are working hard to get this draft finished, and I want to make sure the work you’ve done is protected.
My recommendations are as follows:
- Choose a specific time of the week or month to back up everything that you’ve written (the first of every month, every other Tuesday, every other day, etc.) and consistently make copies of your work. If you’ve been producing the manuscript physically, you will have the added step of needing to digitize it. So, for example, every Friday when you get home from work, the first thing you do is whip out your Moleskin and type up whatever you’ve written that week, and then save that file in two (or more) different ways (see below).
- Save the file in multiple ways / places. This doesn’t mean saving it on your computer’s desktop and a folder on your CPU (these would both be on the same device). This means saving it in your Google Drive and saving it on a flash drive. Or saving it on your email server (by emailing it to yourself) and saving a copy in your AWS account. Or saving an unpublished copy on Inkitt and saving another copy on your laptop’s hard drive. I shoot for an original (1) and two backups (2 and 3). That’s three copies of the manuscript in existence at any given time.
If you follow these two guidelines, you virtually eliminate the possibility of losing huge chunks of your progress.
Keep your work safe, please and thanks!
Check out the Writing lesson for more options related to creating and backing up your work.
