Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Save Me!

Untouched is untouched. Haha, but really not so funny. I haven't written in like two days, but I have been outlining, and working with some ideas on how to vamp up the middle section of the book which has lots of romance, but little plot progression. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. The changes I've come up with are major, so again it's something I'll wait to hear back from the betas about. (Look at me, talking about betas when the dang ms isn't even finished yet. For shame.)

So, I don't know about you guys, but I'm super paranoid about losing what I've written. Because of this I end up saving after every other paragraph or so, unless I'm really on a roll. My entire writing folder- WIPs, ideas, orphan beginnings, random short stories- everything is saved on a one gig USB drive. When I want to write, I pop the USB drive into my computer and type away.

But like I said, I'm super paranoid about losing what I've written, so not only do I have my writing folder saved on my working USB drive, but I have a backup USB drive that I update every couple of weeks. And of course I have the whole folder saved on my desktop computer. And my laptop. I don't update those very often, but if some sort of tragedy happens and I loose my main USB drive, I'll have most of my work saved somewhere else, and I'll be able to reconstruct it. That's the plan, anyway.

So how do you save your precious work? Right on the computer with no backups? Or do you put my paranoia to shame?

P.S. Oh, and apparently commenting on my blog was corrupted with the makeover. Thanks Lady Glam for the email filling me in! I was so sad that no one commented about how pretty my blog was- turns out they couldn't!

5 comments:

  1. Super pretty blog!! :-D I would do a "save as" for the draft you are editing, and save it under another name. That way, your original stays as it is. I am paranoid too! LOL I knowww what ya mean!

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  2. Yes, your blog is quite cool! Very sparkly.

    I am not as good about backing up as you are. I save as I go, but it often just stays on my laptop. Every once in awhile, if I feel like I've made a particularly good change in my WIP, then I'll email it to myself just to make sure it's floating around in cyberspace. It sort of keeps me calm if I remember that nothing I write is so perfect I can't come up with it again. Whether that's true or not, it helps me to rest easy. :)

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  3. I save on a USB, my regular hard drive, my back up hard drive, and the hard drive on my iPod (80 gigs)... so that's 4 spots.

    Oh, and I regularly print out a copy of my work just in case...

    I'm paranoid. I've lost stuff before.

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  4. Periodically, I upload my WIP to my email account and open it with Google Docs. Then, if anything happens to the computer, then it'll be saved in email and Docs, too...

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  5. I save often, but my real concern is my laptop crashing. Five years ago I was working on a different novel. I was over half done with it when my computer crashed and I lost everything. Today they have better retreval techniques, but I'm still paranoid. I try to save everything to google documents since that is in "the cloud". The new layout looks fabulous, by the way!

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