Less of a resource, more some friendly help!

[WeilderOfTheMonkeyBlade]

A few days ago, I committed a major silly.

I hadn't backed any of my work up, off my memory stick, for nearly two months....The thing had been wobbly for over a year, and the saying "familiarity breeds contempt"....well, that S**t is true!!!!!

I've lost between 30-45k of writing. (and a bit of school stuff, mainly history, but who cares about that, I'm only going to do it at Uni next year.... )

I'm not here to have a rant - my mates have already dealt with that.

I just want to tell you TO BACK YOUR WORK UP ALL THE TIME. CONSTANTLY.

GO AWAY, RIGHT NOW, AND DO IT. STOP LAUGHING AT ME FOR BEING A SILLY FOOL AND LOOSING MY WORK (Its fine, I find it kinda funny now) AND BACK IT UP. ALL OF IT. EVEN YOUR TERRIBLE STUFF. TRUST ME. ONE DAY, YOU'LL WANT TO GO AND SEE HOW CRAP YOU WERE.

BACK IT UP
please

 

[Devor]

Skip the memory stick - go with Dropbox or Google Drive. I use Dropbox for my writing and Google Drive for, like, family photos. They both work great. You can connect to them anywhere. They keep a copy of your files on all of your computers and on their servers. There's even a history to recover old versions or the stuff you delete. Google Drive even gives you a ton of space.

 

[CupofJoe]

My commiserations WotMB. Been there, done that... It is all to easily done and a hard lesson to learn.
We are "lucky" enough to have Office 365 at work and are allowed to use the on-line storage for personal work too. I've set up synchs for my day-to-day work and my day-to-day writing that link up my work PCs and my home laptops... as long as I only work on one project per computer at a time... then all is tickertyboo.

 

[Devor]

I saw CupofJoe's post and literally did a facepalm thinking about my previous post. It absolutely bites to lose your work. My only consolation when it happens is that usually I find that it comes out a lot better once I rewrite it. But when you lose that much there's always something you won't get around to replacing.

It's good that you're taking it in good spirits.

Those memory sticks are a backup disaster in the waiting, though. With Dropbox and Google Drive available for free, the only reason I've found to still use a memory stick is when you're working with really big files that would take too long to upload and download from the web.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Thanks for the reminder. Just copied my most recent updates from my laptop to dropbox.

 

[2WayParadox]

I have a test version of Scrivener, and I think I'll buy a license. It saves every x seconds or so, anything deleted goes to a trash folder and to top things of, every time you close Scrivener, it creates a .zip backup. And if you're in the habit of frequent saving, no worries, ctrl+s still works.

Combine that with a service like dropbox or google drive, and the chances of losing work have been decimated.

 

[2WayParadox]

Thanks for the reminder. Just copied my most recent updates from my laptop to dropbox.

I don't know if you know, but you install a dropbox add-in on your pc. It basically creates a map in your explorer (I use windows), and anything you save into that map gets uploaded to the dropbox servers. Quietly and in the background.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I don't know if you know, but you install a dropbox add-in on your pc. It basically creates a map in your explorer (I use windows), and anything you save into that map gets uploaded to the dropbox servers. Quietly and in the background.

I know, but I keep my working files in a separate folder anyway and use the dropbox as a backup. Strictly speaking it may not be necessary, but it's what I've gotten used to doing and what I'm comfortable with.

(and it works similarly on a mac - I use both)

 

[skip.knox]

I have to agree with 2Way. I have both Google Drive and Dropbox connected lived and have mapped Scrivener to put its backup files there (on Dropbox, specifically).

The key is this, guys: your house burns down.

I came to this realization when I was writing my dissertation, which was laboriously saved to diskettes. I always had a second set that I kept at work. My house could burn down, I could lose wife and family, but there was no way in hell I was going to lose that dissertation. Backups are worthless when they've melted.

With the advent of cloud storage and constant connections, there's just no excuse for losing data. Dropbox, or its equivalent for backups, and every so often, when I feel I'm at a certain point in my writing, I'll copy everything to a thumb drive as well, just in case I lose my computer *and* Dropbox is brought down by Dr. Evil. Triple redundancy. It's the NASA way.


[Aside: I originally wrote "droppox" which would make a most excellent fantasy disease. The drop pox. Someone needs to use it, even if only in passing.]

 

[Penpilot]

I use Scrivener, and every week or so, I do a back up and save of my work in progress to Google Drive. A Scrivener back up file is tiny and it takes only a couple of minutes.

As for flash drives for primary storage. That's bad juju waiting to happen. Flash memory has a finite number of read/write cycles, meaning there is a limited amount of times you can read something off of it and write files to it. Normally the number is so high, according to wikipedia 100 000 read-writes, as to be meaningless if you're using it to transfer files and/or back up. But if you're using it as primary storage where a text editor is saving directly to and reading directly from, there can be issues if there's a constant flow of save/read from and to that drive.

That 100 000 read-writes starts to become pretty small if you're reading and saving like 50+ times a session.