Backing up your manuscript

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Umgowa

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Right now my manuscript is backed up on an external hard drive. I was thinking that maybe a strong electrical surge or lightning strike might somehow mess that up, or the drive could be stolen. I do not have a CD or floppy disc copying device. I was thinking that perhaps I should create a CD and put it in a safe deposit box. I'm wondering what you more experienced writers suggest. Thanks.
 

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  • Email a copy of the file to yourself as an attachment. Name the file with the name and the date; so novel_11_20_2019 or something similar.
  • Email a version in .doc or whatever native file format you use AND in .rtf
  • Consider using a "free" gmail or similar account just for backups
  • Get a free Dropbox or OneDrive account and copy the same backup files there
  • Get a 1 gig USB thumbdrive you can keep in your purse or backpack or keyring and do the same with it.
  • Do this routinely
Consider mailing a CD to someone you trust on a regular basis; someone who isn't in the same state as you.

Key point: You need multiple redundant backups. They need to be both online and offline, local to you physically and distant.
 
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talktidy

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I have this mental note to self in mind when I've finished messing with my Scrivener project - doesn't matter how you back-up, just make sure you do and use multiple methods, which was borne out recently, when the last working usb port on my computer stopped working.
 

maggiee19

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I tried burning all my manuscripts to DVD, but my DVD drive stopped working unexpectedly, so I saved my manuscripts on my Google Drive. Google Drive gives you 15 free GB of storage. I have more than one google account because I have a lot of files, but yeah, when there are no physical drives available, it's best to try digital storage. That way you can access your manuscript in different devices, not just computer.
 

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Multiple redundant copies.

Seriously.

We have a single copy of the Beowulf manuscript, and it was badly damaged in a fire.

We have more than 60 complete copies of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in manuscript. They are in libraries and museums all over the world.

You want your manuscript to survive calamity?

Multiple
Redundant
Copies

Spread them around. Use local and distant. On and offline.
 

DMcCunney

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I tried burning all my manuscripts to DVD, but my DVD drive stopped working unexpectedly, so I saved my manuscripts on my Google Drive. Google Drive gives you 15 free GB of storage. I have more than one google account because I have a lot of files, but yeah, when there are no physical drives available, it's best to try digital storage. That way you can access your manuscript in different devices, not just computer.
I have multiple hard drives on my desktop, and an external drive enclosuer, and USB thumb drives, and stuff on Google Drives.

I started on Gmail when it was still invitational beta. A chap on one of my mailing lists worked for Google at the time, and offered invites to list members. I grabbed one, and it fundamentally changed the way I did a lot of things. But I don't bother with multiple Gmail accounts because of the 15GB storage limit on one. While I periodically prune stuff, the biggest user of storage in my Gmail account is email - I'm a packrat, on multiple mailing lists, and some are high volume. Google sells additional storage, and for $2 a month, I get 100GB. The price is well within reason, and the savings of time and trouble involved in managing multiple Gmail accounts just to get around the 15GB storage limit is more than sufficient to justify the purchase by itself.
______
Dennis
 

Umgowa

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I want to thank everyone for their helpful comments above. I opened an account on Box.Com and found the site to be very user friendly. I feel so much better, knowing my manuscript is safely tucked away in "The Cloud" where it can't be lost, or damaged. For the sake of redundancy, I will probably make a copy on a thumb drive.
 

Biffington

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I just thought I'd share some words of warning. None of this happened to me.

I use Google Docs, since it lets me write from multiple devices, but also because it's free. I occasionally backup my stuff in gmail.

There was recently a streamer on youtube (Markipler, or something like that) who encouraged his watchers to spam stuff, like they do in twitch all the time. Youtube's moderation bots banned these people. Thing is, if you get banned from youtube, you get banned from real life your gmail account, your google docs account, and all the rest. They're getting unbanned, slowly but surely, but it happened like two weeks ago, and they have to manually approve each reinstatement.

I'm looking for something else to use, just in case google gets bored and bans me. It's unlikely, but I shouldn't have all my eggs in one basket.
 

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I want to thank everyone for their helpful comments above. I opened an account on Box.Com and found the site to be very user friendly. I feel so much better, knowing my manuscript is safely tucked away in "The Cloud" where it can't be lost, or damaged. For the sake of redundancy, I will probably make a copy on a thumb drive.

Good choice. I've been using Box since 2015. No problems since I began. American universities use it for their students.

If you archive your files in a zip, rar, or other, you can add parity files to them as well. If an archived file (such as a passworded RAR set) is ever corrupted, these files will rebuild them.

If interested, QuickPar is a free Windows application that creates these. Maybe other software exists for other platforms too.
 

kranix1

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Everyone else beat me to what I was gonna say: Save to your hard drive, copy to usb stick or other portable storage, cloud, email yourself a copy, and of course, print a hard copy and store it in a locked filing cabinet or personal safe.
 

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I just thought I'd share some words of warning. None of this happened to me.

I use Google Docs, since it lets me write from multiple devices, but also because it's free. I occasionally backup my stuff in gmail.

There was recently a streamer on youtube (Markipler, or something like that) who encouraged his watchers to spam stuff, like they do in twitch all the time. Youtube's moderation bots banned these people. Thing is, if you get banned from youtube, you get banned from real life your gmail account, your google docs account, and all the rest. They're getting unbanned, slowly but surely, but it happened like two weeks ago, and they have to manually approve each reinstatement.

I'm looking for something else to use, just in case google gets bored and bans me. It's unlikely, but I shouldn't have all my eggs in one basket.

I also found google docs to be the most convenient for writing on many different devices, particularly on phone. It seems like it would be incredibly time consuming to write offline and then keep remembering to save frequent manual backups or email drafts to myself etc instead of just writing in google docs where every change is instantly preserved. If I'm trying a big change like completely different beginning, point of view change etc, then I branch it to a new google doc.

Huge fan of Evernote as well, but the problem with Evernote for writing manuscripts is you can't change line spacing to double-spaced.

I understand your concern about getting locked out of your google account, or even just forgetting your password while traveling or changing phones etc. In my case I have various google accounts (usually get a new one with each phone, then had some for different business projects, another to receive spam etc). I shared my manuscripts with all these accounts, so it is easy to access on any device, even if I somehow lost access to one of the accounts.
 
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JohnLine

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It might be interesting to try a source control repository like bit bucket. That way you'd save every revision as well.
 

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It might be interesting to try a source control repository like bit bucket. That way you'd save every revision as well.

I've used Git and CVS for that for my dissertation and for a couple of scholarly books whose production I managed; great tools but not for the newbie.
 
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Auteur

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I use Cobian Backup (free) to back up onto my SSD and then Google Backup and Sync to back up the backups.
 

PostHuman

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It might be interesting to try a source control repository like bit bucket. That way you'd save every revision as well.

if using google docs, one thing you can do to later make sense of the revisions is opening the version history menu and naming the current version from time to time, for example before important edit etc
 

DMcCunney

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I've used Git and CVS for that for my dissertation and for a couple of scholarly books I whose production I managed; great tools but not for the newbie.
What format were the source files in?

CVS and git are version control systems, but both implicitly expect the source document to be a text file. You check in a document into the VCS. When you want to work on it, you check it out and do revisions. When you check it back in, the VCS does a diff on the new version, and saves what changed as a delta to the original. You can reproduce the source document at any point by starting with the initial check in and applying deltas up the the desired revision point.

But as mentioned, the input is text files. The tools that do diffs and save only the changes from the previous version tend to fall down hard on binary files, which is what word processor documents have historically been.

MS Word (and Libre Office/Open Office Writer) now uses a form of XML as the underlying storage format, and you can theoretically do a diff on that, but it takes some doing. I had a go around with a professor in Britain using Word about it who said he couldn't find the XML file. No surprise, as Word wrapped it in a Zip archive, and he would have to find and open that.

There was a company called Component Software years back who claimed to be able to do version control using a VCS on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. They no longer exist, and I haven't heard of anyone else trying to do it.

Can you talk a bit about what you did?
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Dennis
 

lizmonster

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Not to derail the thread, but git does indeed handle binary files. I've never worked with a source control system that didn't. Of course, what it's doing is saving full versions each time, so a diff isn't going to be especially useful. But as a versioned backup, it's fine.
 

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What format were the source files in?

CVS and git are version control systems, but both implicitly expect the source document to be a text file. You check in a document into the VCS. When you want to work on it, you check it out and do revisions. When you check it back in, the VCS does a diff on the new version, and saves what changed as a delta to the original. You can reproduce the source document at any point by starting with the initial check in and applying deltas up the the desired revision point.

I've been using version control systems for my day job since 1989.

I've also had to support content experts, faculty and authors using git, CVS, and proprietary version control systems.

Most users outside of software and dev communities aren't even sure what a .txt file vs .rtf or .doc is; if you're lucky the average user knows the difference between a Web browser and a word processor.

Many don't; which is why I'm saying using a version control isn't for a newbie. It's not.

And yes, git and CVS can handle binary files; and as Liz Monster notes, it's saving the full version each time, which is why large development projects with fifty or sixty content creators and engineers using the same repository are supervised by a data wrangler or librarian. It's a good idea to have a very clear naming rubric as well as time and date stamps, and, bringing us around full circle, you still need multiple redundant back ups and a test to make sure restore actually works.
 
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sippog

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I second the suggestion to always make multiple backups in case of loss or failure. When it comes to digital artefacts of any kind - nothing is 100% reliable! So creating multiple backups is the closest thing to insuring against loss.

My favoured method of working at the moment is to open a Word document directly from Dropbox. (I like the way the blue Dropbox icon hovers reassuringly at the edge of my document while I'm working.) Then periodically I make hard copies to my computer hard drive and an external drive too.

Saving to the cloud in some form may not be totally foolproof but it does mean

(a) you cant lose work if your equipment is stolen or breaks down
(b) you can access it from anywhere there is a wi-fi connection
 
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