Craft of Writing: Have a back up plan

As recent events may have shown, it is vital to keep a backup of your work. Now, the backup needs to be in a format that still works with your machine. While the floppy is iconic (hence my choice of whipping an old one out from storage) I don't think that there is a single piece of tech on the market right now that uses them.

Thumb drives are pretty awesome. I have a few. I have backups of my backups. This is how I discovered I hadn't lost half of book four, it really was novella length to begin with. (It was a NaNoWriMo project that clocked in at exactly 50K words.) The most important part of having backups is to make sure they are current. If your last backup of your novel or other digital project was thirty versions ago, you are going to lose a lot of work if your system decides to take a dirt nap.

This is where planning to archive work is a good thing. Once a month, or more frequently depending on just what exactly I am working on is, I make backups of my current projects. I also check to make sure that the archives of previous projects are still good both on the computer and on the storage device. Having lost a few novels due to things like data being corrupted on the disk, I am extra careful about making sure that I am not risking this again.

I strongly encourage you to do something similar. I don't want you to go through the anxiety, stress, and heartache of losing major work all because you forgot to back it up.

♥