Got backup? Holy crap, I'm awake now!

I work in Google Drive. Everything gets saved automatically, and I've got it set so I can work offline if the internet crashes. If I do something stupid and delete my whole WIP, it's got multiple backups from the past few months and I can restore any of them with a few clicks. It's worked great so far, and is terrific for my peace of mind.

I have automatic backup to the internet, I back up to an external hard drive, and I backup to a pair of DVDs. I check each as I do the backup. So, yes, I trust my backups.

SkyDrive/OneDrive, whatever Microsoft are calling it these days.
I use that more more out of the convenience of being able to get my files on all my devices than any particular concerns about losing work, though.

I just back up on two external hard drives every two days. One day, if I did a ton of writing on that particular day.

Scary moment!

But yes, I've got backup. External HDD, USB stick, another (encrypted) copy on my work laptop which backs up over VPN to a corporate cloud on a different continent. I'm still paranoid about losing work.

Having been in the tech field for 30 years, I know the value of constant backups. And pretty much skip them. Yep, you got it. Most of my stuff is not backed up. Oh, I work to external devices, use Microsoft Office with the cloud storage (automatic backup of a sort) and tend to make a copy before doing a revision, but I still lose stuff.

On the flip side, I seem to recreate it better than the original, at least in my mind.

Jeff

Back up to a secondary computer and two flash drives.

Angry Guy said:

So, got backups? Trust them?

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I do local backups (from one hard drive to another) constantly, thanks to support for it being integral to Mac OS. Just point the system at the backup drive, and it does backs up the changes every hour or so.

That's really saved my butt a couple of times, including once when I accidentally reformatted my main drive (don't ask).

What I need to set up are regular backups of critical files to somewhere in the cloud -- photos, Quicken files, tax returns, stories, etc -- stuff I don't want to lose if the house burns down. A friend uses a network-attached storage device whose backup software can apparently be pointed at Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, DropBox, etc to do that kind of backup. Glacier is pretty cheap, and for this kind of use I wouldn't care that response times to fetch a backup are counted in days.

I keep saying I need to spend the money and take the time to set something like that up... One of these days...

I use Mozy for a free web-based backup, and also back up my crucial files on flash drive. My pc's been a workhorse for almost nine years now, but computers do crash.

I had Carbonite and an external hard drive on my old pc and now on the new one I still have the external and I'm considering between Mozy, Dropbox and whatever-the-hell Microsoft's option is.

I'm open to suggestions.

I really like the idea of backups, but I never seem to get around to them. I think I still have writing on a 3 1/2 floppy that I can't even access anymore (not that my writing at that age was any good, but that's not the point here). A laptop died a year ago and I still haven't retrieved everything....

Yuuup, Google Drive. I do most of my writing there, and only go into OpenOffice when it comes time to format for the ebook.

Also I have this external hard drive thing hooked up to my PC, and it automatically copies all my stuff, too. So I feel relatively secure at least one of these things will come through for me!

harmonyisarine said:

I really like the idea of backups, but I never seem to get around to them. I think I still have writing on a 3 1/2 floppy that I can't even access anymore (not that my writing at that age was any good, but that's not the point here). A laptop died a year ago and I still haven't retrieved everything....

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Ask around in the Tech Help forum here. I bet someone has a 3.5 inch drive they can hook up to a laptop.

I think I've still got a USB floppy drive sitting in a drawer somewhere. No idea where you are though or whether it'd be worth trying to post a floppy.

Eek. I'm one of those lazy people who knows I should be making backup copies in theory, but then don't. As soon as I get home from work today, I'm going to email myself a full copy of my WIP and another copy of Unicorn Track's manuscript. I really should get an automatic device that I can hook up with Mac's TimeMachine feature, but most of the ones I've seen are just so damn expensive :S

I've pretty much evolved through all the options - USB, emailing myself, etc.

For a long time, it was Google drive, now it's MS OneDrive. It's basically automatic.

Plus, hubby has our system set to auto backup files onto an external server, so even if I do something incredibly stupid and delete everything, even the onine version, I've still got something. Yeah. It's a geeky household.

Data files on OneDrive and a separate hard drive. A full image backup on another hard drive.

cmhbob said:

Ask around in the Tech Help forum here. I bet someone has a 3.5 inch drive they can hook up to a laptop.

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I'll keep that in mind and head that way if I get up the courage to see what I was up to back then.

Never totally trust anything "automatic", especially when it comes to backing up computer files.

caw

Never mistake syncing for backup.

Indeed - there's nothing like automatically syncing the corrupted version of a file over the top of a perfectly good one...

Backups on two flash drives (thumb drives, etc.--pick your terminology) and on an external hard drive.

I learned to do backups the hard way when sectors on one of those 3 1/2 floppy disks went bad. I worked on the manuscript the night before and saved the files and everything seemed fine. Put the disk in the next morning to work on the manuscript again and for some reason the program told me I had over 1,000 pages in the file. I tried to ctrl+end to get to the end of the manuscript and the hourglass stayed up FOREVER. I finally had to shut down the program because it froze. Tried this two more times with the same result. I finally opened the file and used the page down key and everything seemed to be fine until I got to this one part that seemed to be repeating itself over and over. I closed the file and cried off and on for most of the day. By the time my husband got home, I had the crying mostly under control, but when I tried to tell him what was going on, the floodgates opened again. Thankfully, my husband knows computers and somehow he was able to retrieve the file. He told me to save it to two disks and the hard drive on the computer. The only problem was that it turned out that I had two sections that were repeating themselves over and over, which accounted for the 1,000+ pages in the manuscript. And when my husband recovered the file, those two sections had been removed from the manuscript. That was okay, because they weren't long and I did have a hard copy that contained those two sections.

And once when a computer crashed, I thought I had lost the only copy of a manuscript, but I had emailed it to someone and forgot about it. I was chatting with her and mentioned I had lost the manuscript in the crash, she searched her email and found it. She didn't say anything to me about it, but I opened my email one day and there was the manuscript. She had forwarded the original email to me.

So yeah, I make sure I have more than one backup and I trust them. I've lost a few minor changes in manuscripts since then, due to not updating the backups, but nothing like what I went through those two times.

I use Yarny, which automatically saves to the cloud as soon as you stop typing. And I also do backups to my computer and email of a Word version and an epub version.