I can’t harp on enough of backing up your work and once again I was reminded (by my own experience) just why this is so important.

Backups Save Lives

Okay, so maybe that is an over-exaggeration, but if you’ve ever lost work (a lot of work… like a whole novel) you will understand that deep-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach sensation of loss and being unable to function for a while.

I’ve had that happen when my floppy disk (yes, I am THAT old) corrupted…and the backup I made from that floppy – rather than from the source (I was young), also corrupted. and swore I never wanted it to happen again…

Only for years later, for me to spill a whole cup of tea on my laptop and then learn that my (at the time) cloud system was actually shit…

Yeah… I’ve been there.

So nowadays I am a lot more paranoid when it comes to my backups.  Where is this going you might be asking? Well, recently I had the need to use those backups.

The Paper Project

I’m currently undergoing a HUGE project, called… wait for it… Project Paper! I’m so creative 😀  It’s part of my “The Organised Life Challenge.”

Within that project, I was working on official documents. However, I had one of my manic meltdowns and decided I hated all the paper and I wanted to do something big.  Oftentimes I need “big spontaneous moments” to get things done.

I contacted a Professional Shredding company, which sends a truck and shreds your papers, down to powder.  Great if you have confidential papers… and I do.  I have old business papers I no longer need but there is more than my dinky little shredder can handle. 

As well as old business papers to shred… I thought, let’s shred duplicates of my manuscripts/scenes etc and heck, anything else that I need to get rid of that would just take too much time for me to shred through myself.

Well, the Shredding company is coming on 27th April… and I realised my paperwork was… *laughs* intense.  So I’ve spent the last 3 weeks going through a mountain of work.  But I also found old scenes from my Trinity Hart series.  I mean LOADS… a box full… and a binder full… not to mention the filing cabinet drawer full I already knew about.

Being the smart cookie I sometimes am, I started to go through the scenes and check them against my digital copies on my PC. Most were there… some were not. That was worrying, how come I had printed copies but the digital copies were missing?

Panic ensued.

What Came Out Of It

Above Image:  This is my binder, the pink tags are the scenes I couldn’t originally find on my PC. The orange ones are the scenes where the digital copy is not the most updated.  Soooo many!

Thankfully, I had my paper copies (duplicates…of which there were many… are all stacked for shredding) but I’m glad I had paper copies of most of my scenes.

But now I need to find the missing digital files.

Because I have backups, specifically on 2 hard drives I have been able to go back through and retrieve the missing files.  I’m not sure why they are not on my PC from when I transferred everything from my laptop but they were missing.

There are one or two I still can’t locate.  But that’s okay because I have the paper copies and I can just retype them. 

Now, if I had just kept everything digital, I may have lost those scenes.  Especially if I just over-rode all my backups with new ones.  I like to keep earlier copies of my backups, just in case this sort of thing happens.

However, a backup is only as good as it is if used.  So make sure you set up a schedule for backing up, and if you can, set up auto backup on your cloud system.

A note about syncing.  I don’t often sync my backups and devices because I’ve heard too many horror stories where someone deleted something and then the sync deleted it from every other device and so it was lost.

Using The 3-2-1 Rule

If you aren’t sure about the best way to back up your work, aim for the 3-2-1 rule. This was conceptualised by Peter Krogh, a US photographer. Understandable, photography creates a lot of photos and the last thing you want to do is lose them. Especially if you have client photos.

Let’s talk about the 3-2-1 rule.

3 – You should have 3 copies of your data/work

2 – These copies should be on two different media (storage)

1 – With at 1 copy being off-site.

So, if you have a novel – you need to keep 3 copies of it as a backup.  2 of them should be different media, such as a hardcopy printed file and a copy on your external hard drive.  And then to be extra safe, that 3rd copy should be stored off-site using a reliable cloud system.

~ ~ ~

If you haven’t thought about your backup system recently, use this as a reminder to just check on it. Make sure you have systems in place, check they are updating as they should and that you have multiple copies to help in case something goes wrong.

Backups won’t work 100% all the time, every system is fallible.  But the idea is to make it as strong as possible to reduce the risk!

QUESTION: What is your method for backing up your work?

Happy writing & stay safe

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