Oh, there was a reason I got on the Warren Ellis kick. He posted a note on what he uses to write. Maybe I’ll me-too sometime and post a note on the tools I use, already having done the why and the how, but for now I wanted to focus on the following piece of wisdom from Warren Ellis which should be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked on a Ph.D. thesis:
Back-ups. Oh, my god. Burning your stuff to CD or DVD is not good enough. Trust me on that. Things go wrong. Understand that Storage Will Always Fail. Always. I have a ruggedised, manly and capacious 32GB USB memory stick that can withstand fire, water, gunshots and the hairy arseteeth of Cthulhu itself — but my daughter decided she wanted to liberate one of my bags for her use, took the stick out of it and put it ’somewhere safe.’ It has never been seen again. Storage Will Always Fail.
Dropbox is your friend. 2GB of storage for free, a frankly superb little piece of software that syncs your stuff off into the cloud as easily and simply and clearly as possible. I know writers, artists and tv producers who swear by Dropbox, and so do I. I have Dropbox on both computers. If you have a smart phone of the iOS or Android type, you can also have an Dropbox instance on your phone, a fact that’s saved my arse more than once.
I also auto-sync Computer 1 hourly to Jungle Disk. Very cheap, very good. My media library lives on another storage service, Zumodrive, that lives both in the cloud and on my machine as a z:/ drive. (The Zumodrive application also lives on Computer 2.)
Also, I do all mail through Gmail. Which means that a copy of every document I send off lives in the Gmail cloud.
And every five minutes or so, a Western Digital 1TB MyBook copies everything on Computer 1’s desktop.
Paranoid? Yes. Covered? Yes.
Got that, everyone? If you write, especially if you want to do it for a living, go do something like this. And for God’s sake, please, keep a copy offsite. I know too many people who have lost their homes and their art or writing to fire.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Books, Montalbano, reflected books, and Gabby – a reminder to me that my library is a potential firetrap (God forbid!) and that I should be better at storing stuff offsite.
