You get my back up.

As some of you may know, I’ve had a bit of a mare with my computer recently. In fact, I’ve had a bit of a mare with three computers and am now on my fourth in as many months.

As I make my living (meagre though it is) from my writing, I make sure I back-up all of my work. It’s a good thing too or all these changes of computer would have been even worse. Lost work is lost money and all that.

But it got me thinking, do the rest of you make back-ups or do you just get so caught up in your stories that you forget about it? Maybe you think it’s too difficult or expensive. Well, let me tell you; you should back-up because it’s easy and it’s free. And if your hard drive suddenly carks it, like mine did, and you lose all your stories or your unfinished novel then you’ve only yourself to blame.

Housekeepy

There are many ways of making back-up copies of various files or folders on your hard-drive. You can save to a USB stick or portable disc, or you could burn your files to a DVD. You could even back-up your entire hard-drive if you really wanted to, but that’s not what I’m interested in here.

I want to keep this as simple as possible and show you how you can make copies of any file or folder without doing anything complicated… well, maybe a little complicated, but only once.

The first thing you’ll need to learn is, good housekeeping.

Don’t just keep your story files in the My Documents folder on your PC or whatever the Mac equivalent is. Make a special folder and call it My Stories or My Scribbles or Super Happy Fun Time Writing Basho or something. The important thing is to call it something you’ll remember.

Save it somewhere you’ll remember too. If that’s in your My Documents folder, then fine; I keep mine right on the desktop so I never have to think about it too hard. Inside that folder are numerous other folders each of which contains a separate project. How you organise your folder is up to you.

OK, so you’ve got all you stories organised in your story folder. You’ve done this so that when you come to back it up, everything’s in one place. See how easy that’s going to make things?

Now you have to download something and sign up to something.

The back-Up

I’m going to give you a choice of two services and they are, Dropbox and Windows live Sync. They both work with either Pc or Mac and are pretty similar in operation.

Dropbox will create a folder (on my PC it’s right on the desktop) that acts like any other desktop folder. I drag my story folder into it and it’s copied to my Dropbox account in “the cloud”. Windows Live Sync works in a similar way but instead of creating an extra folder, you choose a folder to synchronise; in this case, my story folder. Now every time I make a change to a file and save it within that folder, it automatically updates the online copy too.

How easy is that?

Both of these services provide you with 2Gb of cloud based space, free of charge. That’s more than enough for us writers as our files will mainly be text.

Also, I’ve not gone into detail in how to set these services up as they’re really easy to understand. And I realise that a lot of this post may sound really simple and obvious, but I still see people on Twitter who don’t seem to be aware of things like this. So if I’ve told you stuff you already knew, then I apologise. But if you’ve learnt anything, then I’m happy knowing I’ve helped.

So go and have a look and don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Tagged as: back-up, dropbox, files, folders, live-sync, mac, windows