Back up your work!

Dropbox is fantastic for seamless, no fuss offsite backup. It is also a way of sharing your work between devices and is free up to 2 gb, which should be fine for most peoples writing.

The way it works is dropbox keeps versions of your files on the internet, and your computer keeps versions on a virtual drive/directory locally and then the dropbox helper keeps them in sync. So it's like having versioning, a local copy and an offsite backup.

However, I use dropbox more like a first line of defense. My computer is backed up on a regular basis using apples time machine to a network disk. To avoid apples horrible backup schedule you can use Backup Scheduler for Time Machine and set it to daily backups during the night when you aren't using your computer. Also, Scrivener can be configured to do backups as well, I have it do them into a separate folder so I basically have four copies of everything - time machine, dropbox online, dropbox local, and local directory.

As someone who 'lives' mostly online and has had their entire digital life literally saved by backups more than once I would strongly encourage people to figure out how to make sure their computer is always backed up at least daily and those archives kept at least 3 months. This is essential practice not just for your writing but for general computer use.

Another good alternative would be to use an online "word" document type program. There's many out there in particular you could fine, and easily use.

The one I use to write (especially with how bad my pc is, and I don't want to waste my time downloading/installing any programs) is Zoho Docs. It's a really good document site/program that has the functionality of Window's Word (or Open Office), but it also auto saves everytime you time. Although, so I'm not advertising them, a good alternative would be Google Docs. I never used Google's document service before, but I think it works the same as Zoho Docs.

This way you don't have to worry about saving constantly, or backing up.

MySummerJob said:

This way you don't have to worry about saving constantly, or backing up.

Click to expand...

Yes you do have to worry; online docs can be lost or corrupted. Always backup.

You should have multiple redundant backups. At least daily:

• Use a portable USB thumbdrive.
• Use a cloud service like DropBox or OneDrive or Google Drive
• Email the current version to yourself daily as an attachment. Use a special email account just for this if you want.

I email my kindle account every couple of days, so that I have computer + email + amazon doc for backup.