2 thoughts on “Manuscript Safety and Why I Fired Microsoft OneDrive”
wendy
Since I don’t have home internet, online file storage isn’t even a consideration. I have an external drive (actually,two) that I periodically save my entire “writing” folder to, and often save copies of my most-frequently-worked-on projects to flash drives. The only major loss I ever encountered was when I learned the hard way that OpenOffice’s idea of “revert” meant “lose the changes made since the last time OpenOffice was closed” rather than “go back to the last time the user hit ‘Save.'” I lost about two weeks of work on my Edmund Fitzgerald book.
Oof! That had to hurt. Authors without internet have a harder time arranging for off-site backup files. I know that’s a pain. No place on the globe is safe from natural disasters, and every home is at risk of theft, flooding, or fire. It is essential to get recent copies of on-going work out of the house to a secondary location and (better) out of town; how often backups leave the house is determined by how much lost work you can endure. Naturally, off-site backups apply to master files for our manuscripts too. Maybe you could arrange for a bank box or a friend’s or relative’s house. Thanks for sharing!
Since I don’t have home internet, online file storage isn’t even a consideration. I have an external drive (actually,two) that I periodically save my entire “writing” folder to, and often save copies of my most-frequently-worked-on projects to flash drives. The only major loss I ever encountered was when I learned the hard way that OpenOffice’s idea of “revert” meant “lose the changes made since the last time OpenOffice was closed” rather than “go back to the last time the user hit ‘Save.'” I lost about two weeks of work on my Edmund Fitzgerald book.
Oof! That had to hurt. Authors without internet have a harder time arranging for off-site backup files. I know that’s a pain. No place on the globe is safe from natural disasters, and every home is at risk of theft, flooding, or fire. It is essential to get recent copies of on-going work out of the house to a secondary location and (better) out of town; how often backups leave the house is determined by how much lost work you can endure. Naturally, off-site backups apply to master files for our manuscripts too. Maybe you could arrange for a bank box or a friend’s or relative’s house. Thanks for sharing!