Comments on: Why You Should Have More Than One Backup of Your Writing

By: Adam Rodman

Adam Rodman — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 23:38:35 +0000

In reply to Nicole Bianchi. One of the gifts my father gave me was that he was late on deadlines. I mean L-A-T-E. He once turned in project 18 months late. Somehow, I found this pleasing. I figured that no matter how badly I screwed up, I would never be 18 months late. SO far, that has proved true! Adam Rodman

By: Nicole Bianchi

Nicole Bianchi — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 23:35:12 +0000

In reply to Adam Rodman. Hi, Adam! Just saw your comment now. So terrible that your father lost all of his work. That's always a terrible feeling. Your process for saving your work sounds great. Thanks for sharing!

By: Adam Rodman

Adam Rodman — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:57:40 +0000

Back in the early 1980s, my father, a film and television writer, got his first personal computer. It had 8″ floppy discs and crashed a lot. It was also vvvveeeerrrryyy slow. I showed him how to speed things up by creating a RAM disc from free memory. I warned him about making sure to back up to the floppies as often possible. But…

As was often the case, my father was late on a deadline. He was supposed to go away for the weekend with my mother and had spent the whole night working through the last thirty pages of the project. I was sipping coffee with my mother when I head a scream of agony and despair. “Don’t touch anything!” I told him as I rushed into his office. Everything was locked up, and try as I might, I couldn’t get it going again. He had to reboot, and lost everything.

From that horrible incident, I took a valuable lesson. I start every day’s work by saving to a new file, usually with the day’s date and year in the filename so that I can identify it quickly. I back up to two cloud series, and I have a local backup as well. I also email projects to myself so that they are easy to find just by logging in to google mail.

It’s been a very long time since I lost pages. I wish you all the same. As they used to say on HILL STREET BLUES, “Be careful out there.”

By: Nicole Bianchi

Nicole Bianchi — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 13:41:01 +0000

In reply to -c-. Sorry to hear that you lost your post, C! But glad you were able to rewrite it. Yes, Dropbox is great for backing up one's work. Thanks for your comment. :)

By: -c-

-c- — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 23:20:02 +0000

Wish I had read this last night! Thankfully, it was a short blog post that I could rewrite.
It’s a great reminder and I’ll start using Dropbox more. I have it synced to scrivener but I don’t use it very often.

By: Nicole Bianchi

Nicole Bianchi — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 13:09:06 +0000

In reply to Pooja V.. Hi, Pooja! :) Thank you for your comment. Glad you found the post helpful.

By: Pooja V.

Pooja V. — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 06:41:31 +0000

Hello Nicole! Such an important and a helpful post! I cannot even imagine how horrible it might feel to lose one’s hard work in an instant. Thanks a ton for sharing.

By: Nicole Bianchi

Nicole Bianchi — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 15:07:25 +0000

In reply to Meg.

Hi, Meg! Thank you so much for your comment. 🙂 Oh, my! That sounds absolutely horrible about your hard drive crashing. I can’t imagine losing an entire course assignment — college is stressful as it is. Glad you were able to recover earlier drafts of your work.

Yes, those types of things have happened to me too. I once wrote up an entire blog post in WordPress and didn’t realize it wasn’t saving because my Internet had gone out. I’ll never do that again.

Thanks again for reading and sharing your story! 🙂

By: Nicole Bianchi

Nicole Bianchi — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 14:57:59 +0000

In reply to Nicholas. Thanks for your comment, Nicholas! Sorry to hear you had the same problem with Draft. Haha, yes, I do hope we're never hit with an EMP. Then we'd have to return to the trusty pen and paper.

By: Meg

Meg — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 10:49:16 +0000

Hey, Nicole!
An awesome reminder indeed!!
Losing work has happened to me a number of times, but one of the first – and most frustrating examples – was in college when I was doing a course assignment. I had been working on it for over a month and my hard drive crashed!
Eventually we managed to restore some of the previous work versions of the project (not the final one), but I had to skip the exam, letting my teachers know of the incident, and I completed it next season. It was stressful indeed, and this is when I started backing up my projects on CDs and other external storage.
Additionally, I have lost work when forgetting to hit the Save button, pressing incidentally the Back button of a browser, having a power cut, and other odd examples.
But – yeah, this is all a part of the learning process and, as you say, if Hemingway was able to take it in stride, so can we. 😉
Thank you for the nice article!