It happened two weeks ago. I switched on my computer to continue working on my next novel, with a word count of over 120,000, only to find the file gone! I panicked. Had I lost everything? Would I have to start all over again?
Thankfully, I made a backup on a separate disk the night before. Phew! Disaster averted.
When was the last time you backed up your writing files? With so much data stored electronically, technology companies promote the importance of keeping backups on World Backup Day, which is celebrated every year on 31st March.
However, writers losing vast swathes of work is not a digital phenomenon. In 1919, T. E. Lawrence left his entire Seven Pillars of Wisdom manuscript on a train at Reading Railway Station. Despite extensive searching, railway staff couldn’t find the manuscript, and Lawrence had to start writing the entire 600-page book all over again, from memory.
Even writers who took precautions have experienced disastrous consequences. In 1922, Ernest Hemingway’s wife had her bags stolen from a train luggage rack in Switzerland. At the time, the bag contained all of Hemingway’s original writings, a draft novel set in World War One, and even the carbon copies of his work.
Hemingway’s experience is a reminder that simply making a backup isn’t enough. Where and how we store those backups is just as important.
Backup Basics
The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is a good starting point. The three means having at least three copies of our work—the original file plus two backups. The two signifies having backup copies on two different media (such as another hard drive and online), while the one refers to the safety net of storing one backup offsite somewhere.
Most people using the 3-2-1 system have a working file on their computer, then typically save a copy to a separate external drive or thumbnail drive, and then make another copy saved to an online file storage system.
Keeping a separate copy on another external hard drive ensures that if the computer or laptop dies, or is stolen, we still have two copies of our work.
I always take my external backup hard drive with me when I go away. Should anyone steal my desktop computer while the property is empty, I still have two copies of my work.
An offsite backup protects us against something catastrophic, such as a house fire or flood. We still have access to a copy of our work, even if both the desktop computer and the separate external storage backup are destroyed.
System Settings
The simplest way to back up all our work is to use the built-in backup services that are part of our computer’s operating software. Windows users should check out Windows Back Up and Restore, while Apple users should explore the Time Machine software.
Ideally, use an external hard drive that has at least the same, if not more, storage capacity than your computer or laptop. The first backup using these services will take a long time because they take a complete snapshot, or carbon copy, of your computer’s hard drive. It copies everything: operating system, preferences, all our programmes, as well as our files. After that, future backups become much quicker because only the newest files created since the last backup need to be copied across.
If ever we accidentally delete a file, or the one on our computer is corrupted, we can restore it from the backup drive, assuming a backup copy has been made since the file was created.
I use this system to make a backup of my desktop computer twice a week.
Backup Frequency
How frequently should we backup? That depends. Another way to phrase this question is, how much writing are you prepared to lose? This often depends on the writing project.
When drafting articles, losing a day or two’s edit isn’t a major disaster for me, if I still have the first draft. Whereas, if I’m writing a non-fiction book, or a novel, losing a couple of thousand words could be a significant loss. When I’m working on a large project, I often make an external backup every day, if not twice a day (especially if the words flowed well and I’ve added a lot to the manuscript!).
Dedicated backup software often offers more flexibility in determining which files to back up and how often they should be backed up. We can configure them to back up files that don’t change often, like computer programmes and our operating system, on a weekly basis, but to copy our writing project files to another location on a daily, hourly, or even more frequent basis.
Keeping all our writing in one folder makes backing up our important work and files much simpler.
Software Solutions
Dedicated writing software, like Scrivener and Ulysses, have their own backup options. It’s always worth configuring these, even if you have an existing backup strategy. Set the backup frequency to whatever time duration you feel most comfortable with, and set the backup location to a different folder (or drive) to where the software typically saves files.
This is useful for those times when we delete a large scene from the novel, then realise we’ve deleted the wrong one! It’s also useful when a file becomes corrupted, preventing us from opening it.
Cloud Considerations
Saving files to free cloud storage services, like iCloud, Google Drive, and OneDrive, means we can often access our writing files from a variety of devices. However, exercise caution with these because these services mirror files rather than back them up.
Mirroring means the service checks the file on the cloud with the file on the device you are using and then synchronises them with the latest version if there are differences. If the file on the cloud is newer than the file version on your device, it will sync that to your device. However, if the version on your device is newer, the device will send its version to the cloud.
While this lets us work on a file from different machines, it means we are, effectively, only working with one file. Delete a scene from the novel on the computer and the cloud will update that version to mirror that deletion.
Don’t use these mirroring cloud syncing services as an offsite backup, because that’s not what they are.
Online Options
Paid cloud backup services offer more protection. Dropbox offers a free tier of up to 2GB of online storage space. Delete a file from this and you have up to thirty days to restore it. After that, the file is lost forever. However, some of Dropbox’s paid service plans allow users to restore files deleted up to 180 days after their initial deletion.
The companies behind these cloud backup services also take precautions to minimise the risks of data loss. For example, pCloud.com saves copies of customers’ files to five different servers to prevent complete data loss.
Typically, free cloud services offer limited storage. Dropbox offers 2Gb of storage for free, iCloud and OneDrive provide 5Gb, whereas each Google account has 15Gb of free storage (although that’s for all of its services such as email, photo, and file storage).
As writers, most of our files are simple text files, which are significantly smaller than photo or video files. This means the free storage solutions may be enough to provide a separate online backup of our writing.
Dedicated online backup services like Crashplan and Backblaze offer unlimited online storage solutions, longer deleted file retention periods and unlimited versioning (every time you make a change to a file, it records a copy of that version), for around $100 a year. Whether that’s good value or not comes down to how much your data is worth to you? What would be the impact if you lost all of your writing?
Sneaky Solutions
What if you’re working from a laptop in a cafe and have had a really productive afternoon writing, but forgotten your backup drive and are paranoid about losing your work? If you have access to the internet, a temporary solution is to email a copy of your work-in-progress to yourself. That way, there will be two copies of your file on the email provider’s servers: one in the Sent folder, the other in the Inbox.
You could always copy in a relative or friend to your email, too, so they have a copy should you ever find yourself locked out of your email account.
Some writers take this one step further and create a dedicated email address for backups. With Google offering 15Gb of free storage per account, a Gmail account offers enough storage for hundreds of writing projects. Create an email address, such as your-name-writingbackups@gmail.com, and then email a copy of everything you write at the end of each day to that address.
Put the manuscript title and any version reference in the subject line to make it easier to find should you need to go into the email account to retrieve something.
Ultimately, as writers, we can never have too many backups. Ideally, we need several backups in more than one location. The best way to do this is to have a backup drive beside our computer and then another online backup solution. How we do that will depend upon our individual circumstances. What is most important is having a backup strategy in the first place and following it, so backing up our writing becomes a habit.
If backing up ever feels like a chore, just put yourself in T.E. Lawrence’s or Hemingway’s shoes for a brief moment, and imagine having to start writing your novel again from scratch. A minute spent backing up could save you years of heartache, rewriting something from memory.
Business Directory
| Provider | Free Online Storage | Paid Plans |
|---|---|---|
| iDrive.com | 10GB | 5TB for $69.95 per annum |
| pCloud.com | 10GB | 2TB for £99.99 per annum |
| Dropbox.com | 2GB | 2Tb for £7.99 per month |
| Sync.com | 5GB | 2TB $8 per month |
| Crashplan.com | None | 200Gb for $2.99 per month or unlimited backup space for $88 per annum |
| Backblaze.com | None | Unlimited backup space for $99 per annum |
© Simon Whaley