In Which We Discuss Backup Methods

Once NaNo rolls around, I always see a lot of talk about backing up your work. In fact, I think NaNo has a national "back up your novel" day to remind everyone to do so. Not that it helps anyone who loses their novels before then (and I already know of one girl in my region who lost everything and had to start over)

Almost everyone I talk to says the same thing:

I email it to myself
AND I save it on a jump/flash drive so I am safe.

But are you?

I remember once, back when I still regularly read Murderati, one of the writers said he had added a good 10K onto his novel when he experienced some sort of corruption. The corruption erased the 10K not only from his computer and the jump drive but ALSO (and this is the kicker) in his Gmail.

So even though he was super anal about backing things up, his methods still didn't work.

Which is when he discovered the wonderfulness of Dropbox.

Which is, of course, when I discovered it as well.

Dropbox is a free program/website that allows you to save your documents or pictures or whatevs. You can download it on your personal PCs (it uploads a cute little box on your desktop) AND, it's also available online, so you can access your work on a public PC if you need to, no carrying around a flash drive.

One of the best things about dropbox, though, is that it SAVES PREVIOUS VERSIONS.

So if you make a huge change in your novel, save it, and then immediately have regret, well no worries. Dropbox has your older versions saved as well.

I've been using Dropbox for almost a year and I LOVES IT.

It offers so much space (though I'm sure if you upload a lot of photos your space could easily fill up) AND they offer even MORE space for every computer you download the box on. For example, I downloaded it on both my old and new laptop, and Twin's PC and I got an extra 250 MB for each PC. You can also earn more space by recommending it to others if you roll that way.

I have a few photos uploaded, but even with all of my writing stuff saved, along with our board game info and some stuff of Twin's in there, I'm still only using like 5% of the space.

So let's say I upload my novel on Twin's PC (why I'm using her PC, I don't know, but let's just suspend disbelief for the purpose of the hypothetical).
I save my novel in her dropbox and it is automatically updated in all my other dropboxes on my laptops.

OR, I take a fun photo and upload it to my dropbox. Instead of then emailing the photo to someone, I can just share the dropbox folder with them. They can open the folder and see whatever I have stashed in it.


IT. IS. AWESOME.

I cannot overstate the awesomeness. Because the best thing about it is, I don't ever have to worry about emailing myself and saving my novel to a flash drive ever again. Which frees up more time, which I can then use to get more writing done.




So, are you still emailing and flash driving your work? Do you have a fun program like Dropbox?