Tuesday Tips: Backups

Today's tip is the most boring, most important tip of all. Maintaining Backups.

Some people will stop reading this post already. They will be saying, "Yeah yeah yeah, I know."

One of my life rules says, Every now and then consider the worse case scenario and prepare for it.

My house burned down when I was a kid. Are your projects safe if that happens? Maybe, a virus eats your computer?  Your laptop might get stolen?

I used a multi-layered approach:

• Auto-save. This will keep you from losing the last two hours of work because you lost power.
• Version control. I use Scrivener that does full copies at significant points in my stories.
• On-site backups. Have a second location location on your home network. This is good if your computer fails.
• Off-site backups. I use Cloud based services for this.
• Create a .bat file to do copies on startup.

All of these should be don't automatically.

One final thing I do is I email my doc to myself at the end of each writing session. Some people even set up a special GMail account for their backups emails.

--Stop what you are doing and run a backup NOW!