Are You Sure Your Novels Are Safe?
19:17
I have a pretty good system in place for backing up my
novels if I do say so myself. Each one is stored in multiple locations on my
computer, in case of file corruption. Many few reside in Google Drive, some
live in my emails, and a few live on a USB drive. The files themselves are labelled
with a title, draft number, and year completed, and are all very easy to find. All
the books most important to me are perfectly safe. Well, so I thought. But, as
I’ve had occasion to be reminded, no matter how good the system, it can still
fail, and you can still end up searching frantically for a book that has simply
disappeared.
My writing is all done in Scrivener mainly, with brief
forays into Word. I love Scrivener, and I highly recommend it if you’re looking
for good writing. But in order to save Word Documents and the like to your computer,
you have to export them into a new file format first, creating another step.
Which is usually fine. I normally wait until the end of the draft to do so, and
then back everything up neatly. I admit, I don’t have a great system in place
for backing things up in the middle of a draft yet, but I haven’t lost anything
then either, so I’m sure that’s a lesson for a later date. But what happens
when, at the end of the draft, you’re so busy prepping for Camp NaNo that you
forget to export the document properly and back it up to all those multiple
locations you’re so proud of?
You lose an entire draft.
This was me today. On attempting to open Draft 6 of The Crystal Tree for a read-through
prior to editing, I found I couldn’t locate the file at all. Cue a desperate
search for the missing document. What had happened to my amazing system? Well,
I completed the novel in March, barely three weeks before Camp NaNo, and in all
the rush to prepare for that, I forgot to back everything up properly.
Scrivener is a lovely reliable program. It saves everything every two seconds.
I had no worried about losing that. Until I searched for the Scrivener project
in the hopes of downloading another copy of the draft, and found that almost
all my Scrivener projects were missing too.
To be honest, I still don’t know where they went. I didn’t
delete them, and I still have the ones from the two latest Camp NaNos, but most
of them are gone. For most of them, it’s not a huge drama. I have the drafts
safely backed up. Except for The Crystal
Tree Draft 6. It slipped through the cracks and was lost.
I searched for ages, dredging through the bowels of two different
computers in an attempt to recover even a partially written draft. Anything
that might save me from having to do all that work over again. And finally, I
did locate something, hidden in a mislabelled file in the wrong part of the
computer, away from my beautiful system of back-ups. A single copy of the sixth
draft, one hundred percent complete, one hundred percent beautiful, and one
hundred precent backed up now, hopefully never to go missing again.
Even though my system of backing stuff up is pretty good,
and most of my novels are perfectly safe, things fall through the cracks. When
life gets busy, or Camp NaNo sneaks up on you, it’s very easy to forget that
you haven’t made sure your latest draft is safe. And it’s scarily easy to lose
all that work. I’ve learnt this lesson before, and I’m sure I’ll learn it again
the future. But today, I’d like to give you a gentle reminder. When was the
last time you backed up your novels? If your hard drive fried, would your
writing be safe? If you’re not sure, maybe spent a few minutes uploading
everything to Google Drive, your online email account, or anywhere else on the
internet where they will be safe. Our job as writers is hard enough at the best
of times without losing months of work in a hardware malfunction.
How many places do you
back your novel up in? Have you ever permanently lost a novel? What is your
system for backing up a novel during the process of writing/editing, or
afterwards?
18 comments
I should back up my novels onto my emails! I would hate to loose my novels. I'm glad that you found your novel though. It's always disappointing when we have to start again.
ReplyDeleteAlso I wrote a post about ten things you need to know about your novel characters today.
Bye for now,
Melanie :)
I'll have to hop over and read your blog post Melanie. I'm afraid I'm very behind on a lot of blogging at the moment. There never seems to be enough time to catch up on everything I'm afraid. Definitely email yourself a copy of your books. It is the worst feeling loosing all that work, even for a short amount of time.
DeleteOh gosh. ALL the hugs and takeout to you for finding your sixth draft! Must have been a huge relief. I constantly forget to back up -- I save it to a USB now and then, and the completed ms goes on the Google Drive, but my backups are far and few between. So maybe I'll go do that now. Thanks for the reminder :P
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how backing novels up is so very important, and yet we writers constantly forget to do it. I guess we're too busy creating to remember all the important practical details. I'm actually always nervous about admitting I'm a terrible backer-upper, because people always seem to be way better at remembering to look after their darling novels than I am.
DeleteWhat a scare! I'm SO happy you found it!! I recommend Google Drive. Seriously. Just throw it in there every time you finish a writing session - it's a good backup peace of mind. I'm a fanatical backup-er, I've had this happen at least somewhat one too many times!
ReplyDeleteGoogle Drive looks to be the best place to dump everything. After I wrote this post, I put all my novel drafts in there. Including old drafts of books, that came to 30 different files. At least I can pretend I write a lot. Hopefully I learn my lesson from this and become as good at backing my work up as you are
DeleteGah, that stinks you lost your backups! I usually have a huge hardware box thing that can save about 32 GB of storage and that's where I put my novels, as well as Google Drive and the USB I think I lost... Good thing all of the files are password protected.
ReplyDeletexoxo Morning
A harddrive like that is such a good idea. I should have one of those and back everything up onto that every so often. It'd be better than a USB. I have a terrible habit of losing those the moment I turn my back. It sounds like all your work is very protect though, which is fantastic!
Delete*faints with relief* I'm so glad your work wasn't lost--oh goodness, that's the most awful feeling ever. I've had a couple scares, mostly software glitches where the computer thought my document had been deleted. I back my work up almost every day, just in case, and I try to make sure I have one offsite copy saved, one hard copy, one copy on USB or disc, and one on the computer itself. Somehow, though, despite my best efforts, I did lose a whole day's work once (about five hours), and I had to redo it all. Fortunately I a) noticed the problem before assuming I was almost done with the draft and b) remembered pretty much all the changes I'd already made, enough that it only took thirty minutes to zip from place to place and tweak everything. But gosh, that's just about the worst feeling ever. I'm so, so, so glad you found your draft.
ReplyDeleteWow, I can't imagine losing a whole day's work. Most of the time I can't even remember what I wanted to change, so I would have been freaking out about that. But you have such a great sounding system to your back-ups. Your novels will be very safe I'm sure.
DeleteI fortunately haven't gone through the trauma of losing an entire novel and I'm so glad you found yours! I have a back up service I pay for, plus I've sent off the works to a few friends, plus Scrivener back up.
ReplyDeletestoritorigrace.blogspot.com
I couldn't even get into my Scrivener back-up with this one unfortunately. I think I may have edited my book right before I got a new computer. I do love how reliable Scrivener is normally though. Its autosave feature in particular is a life saver!
DeleteI learned the hard way earlier this year and lost an entire novel. 60,000 words. Thankfully I found an early draft on a usb but most of it was completely gone. That was probably one of the worst feelings ever, I curled up on my floor and cried for probably a half hour. :( Now I"m very careful to back everything up and on multiple hard drives and I use Google Docs too.
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, I'm so sorry to hear that! I can only imagine how devastating that must have been for you. I'm sure you can make the rewrite of it even better though. Google Drive appears to be one of the best ways to back-up novels. I know I'm going to use it for all my drafts from now on (my faulty memory obliging of course).
DeleteWow, I'm glad you found that draft! For a while there I thought you were going to say that you never found it. I always write in Google Drive so I know that my work will always be available in the cloud, but sometimes I get extra panicky and think of horrible scenarios like some freak accident where Google Drive disappears. Luckily, I know that won't happen, so it's all good. I also regularly spend time coding, so I have to make sure that my code is backed up since I don't write it in an editor that saves automatically. Then, I just copy and paste it into an email to myself. Basically, I just rely on Google services to keep everything safe. Let's hope nothing happens to Google! :P
ReplyDeleteGoogle Drive is definitely the best for keeping novels safe. I like to write in Word or Scrivener normally, so unfortunately I have to manually back all my stuff up. Which, considering this is me, is always a bit hit and miss. Your writing sounds like it's all very safe though, and your coding too. I can imagine it would be just as terrible to lose large amounts of complicated code.
DeleteWhew! I'm so glad you found your novel! I know I need to do this. I know this. I do. I need to. BUT I HAVEN'T. It just takes so long to upload stuff. -.- But, in foresight, it is less time than it would take to rewrite a novel. I must do this. But tomorrow. Because I am actually unable to get to my writing right now. *sigh* Thanks for the PSA, Imogen!
ReplyDeleteI know how you feel about backing things up. It's important, but it takes too much time and effort, and usually, personally, I'm tired enough from finishing the book that I just forget to bother to make sure I've got multiple copies of it. You should definitely make sure your work is safe though. From what I've seen of it, it is far too good to be lost.
Delete