Back Up Your Writing

Over the years, I've come across writers who don't back up their work. I've had professional writers ask for help because their computer has gone wrong and they've lost some vital manuscript. In the old days BC (before computers) not backing-up was perhaps understandable. Copying a document by hand is laborious and time-consuming. Mediaeval monks devoted their lives to it. These days, if you use a computer to compose or edit what you write, losing a document is unforgivable. Writing is hard and the words you get down are precious. But backing up what you write is very easy. No-one should lose work in this way.

What you need is a backup that happens automatically. Backing up manually - remembering to copy files to a CD every now and then for example - is too hard. You inevitably forget, or miss out files. The backup is never as reliable as it should be. Besides, remembering to do simple, repetetive tasks like this is what computers do best. In fact, that's pretty much all they do. So if you're not currently backing up, set it all up now and then you can get on with the creative stuff, secure in the knowledge that you're covered in the event of disaster.

In fact, I think what you need are two separate backups. Partly this is for extra security. Mainly it's because they each solve slightly different problems. Neither is particularly tricky to set up. Within an hour or so you can have them both in place. And crucially, they will both be automatic.


Local Backup

This means keeping a copy of all your work on another drive, computer or device to which your computer is directly attached. So, something at your home or office. The point of this is to let you quickly and easily get a document back if you accidentally wipe its contents or delete it. It's easily done. But having a local backup means a potential disaster becomes nothing more terrible than finding your backup copy and restoring it over the original.

So, what you need is a place to put your backup and some software to maintain it. At a pinch, you don't need to buy any extra hardware. You could just back everything up to another folder on your computers hard drive. But a second drive of some kind is preferable. That way you're covered if your hard drive develops a fault, or if your computer suddenly stops working. If you have two computers networked together in some way, that's ideal. Do a cross-backup so that the important files on each are backed up to the other. Or you could buy an additional hard disk solely for the purposes of backing up to. I use an external USB drive. You pretty much just plug them in to a spare USB socket and you're done.

A writable CD or DVD is another option but I wouldn't recommend them myself. They tend to be fiddly and unreliable, although they're better than they used to be. Plus you have to faff around with the discs, making sure you put the backup one in after listening to some music, say. Too fiddly. A perfectly good option is to use a memory stick/USB thumb drive. Again just plug one into a spare USB socket and you're sorted. Memory sticks have become incredibly cheap of late, and incredibly capacious too. At the time of writing you could pick up a 2 gigabyte (GB) drive for a few pounds. It wouldn't do for backing up pictures or video but for written documents it's ideal. 2 GB can store a 100,000 word novel a couple of thousand times over. A memory stick is also portable - you can easily take it with you if you're worried about your computer for some reason.

As to software, you just need something that can maintain a copy of your files on your backup device. You just tell it where you keep everything - My Documents, say - and it will automatically backup new and amended files. There is a lot of such software about. Some of it is free - e.g. Microsoft's SyncToy. You just need to configure it once and you're sorted.

With all these approaches, be careful about making changes to the backup copy of a file rather than the original. If you're not careful, you could end up losing changes when the original is automatically copied over the (changed) backup. You can set up more complex synchronisation schemes so that you can make changes on either side, but it can get fiddly. Best to only make changes to the originals.

Another thing to be aware of is that, if you change an original file without realising it, then the unwanted change will just automatically be copied to your backup and you could lose work. You can get round this by configuring the software you use to keep multiple copies of the backed-up files. So, as well as the current original, it would maintain a number of previous versions. This can be handy, too, if you decide you want to pull something out of a previous revision that you had discarded. You decide you want a certain phrase or rhyme back, for example, in which case you can just open the relevant backup, copy out the bit you want, and paste it back into the current version.


Remote Backup

I'd advise also setting up a remote or off-site backup. Having everything local is handy, but if disaster strikes, if your machine is stolen, say, or damged by water or fire, then the chances are you'll lose your local backup too. Set up an automated remote backup and you're completely covered. Getting files back from a remote location is harder, but at least you can be sure the files still exist in the event of disaster.

These days, there are many web sites offering online backups. In the past I've used Mozy and Carbonite, but there are plenty of others. Typically they backup your documents in the background when you're online. So you really need broadband. Some offer a free level of service for a capped amount of backup - for example, you can get 2GB of free offsite backup. You just need to sign up, download the software, configure as instructed and that's it. So long as you place new documents in the configured folder, anything you write will be securely backed up - locally and remotely.


Testing, Testing

It's probably the software developer in me, but the other thing I'd recommend doing is testing everything works once you've got it set up. Create a new document and/or amend an existing one and, once the relevant backup process has had chance to run, you should see the change appearing in your backup. If you can't, something is wrong.

The other thing to check is that you can get files out of the backup successfully. It's incredibly common for people to skip this. It's not unknown for people to only discover they can't retrieve files when disaster strikes - by which time it's too late.


If you don't currently back up what you write - i.e. if you're just hoping that you won't have a hardware failure or some other problem - then you need to sort out a backup now, before disaster strikes. It isn't tricky to set up. And it's certainly a lot easier than retyping everything you've ever written ...