When I first began writing, it was on an older Dell PC. I wanted to be able to work at school on the library’s computers. But I had two major problems:
- It was 2009.
- Only one computer in the house had dial up, and it wasn’t mine.
With 0 access to (or even knowledge of) sites like Reddit and Stack Exchange, I had to figure out something using my wits and whatever I could find clicking around Windows XP. I discovered the “briefcase” file type, which is essentially a copy of a PC’s folder on a USB stick. I could make changes to the files on the USB drive, and, once I got home, could easily sync the changes. It meant I also had a “backup” of my writing on the USB drive, which would be good for me if something happened to my PC when I was at school.
You can probably see some issues with this system. It required me to remember to sync the changes…and for the USB drive to not get lost, damaged, or destroyed. Which was a lot more common than you think (remember having to manually eject a drive?). I could back up/carry as much stuff as would fit on a USB drive (which was <1 GB), and I would have issues if I tried to work on a non-Windows computer.
And, of course, if the house caught fire in the middle of the night and I forgot to take my USB drive with me in my blind panic, everything would be gone.
Backing up your data is important for everyone, especially as a writer. So, for the first real post in this OpSec for Writers series, I want to talk about this critical process. I’ll go over the purpose of backups, the additional benefits of doing so, and some suggestions on how you can do this for your own unique workflows.
For the purposes of this post, when I talk about your “writing” or “data,” I’m solely talking about digitized versions, especially of the pieces you’re currently working on. I plan on addressing long-term archival (old contracts, contributor copies of books/issues/etc.) in a future post, as well as how to integrate physical writing (notebooks, etc.) into your backups/archives.
Do you feel (un)lucky?
Security is about minimizing risks, but not all risks are created equal. The chance that an earthquake will happen within a calendar year where I live in the San Francisco Bay area is basically 100%. But whether there will be an earthquake that is large/severe enough to cause damage to my computer is somewhere between 0 and 100. Much closer to 0 than 100, but it’s high enough that I’ve read the FEMA pages on what to do during/after an earthquake. But if there was ever an earthquake that bad, I would have bigger issues, like needing somewhere new to live. But if I lived in, say, Ohio, the chances would be even lower.
Risk can be calculated as the chance an event can happen multiplied by the impact that event would have.
You can calculate this with hard numbers (especially if you want to calculate the “value” of infrastructure or production time), but qualitative assessment is fine for writers’ concerns.
You can, of course, choose to do nothing and solely rely on nothing bad ever happening ever. You’d be accepting that level of risk, which some people are fine doing. But most people aren’t that tolerant of risks, or perhaps aren’t aware of the true value of the risk.
The chance you might lose it all
If you’re reading this post, you’re probably pretty serious about your writing! Which means you will be doing this for one or more decades.
This means that there is a near 100% rate that your computer will fail.
Depending on how technically-minded you are (or if you have access to technically-minded folx), as well as how lucky you are, your computer failing might not destroy your data. Your laptop’s screen being busted doesn’t harm your data, but spilling a drink on it might. You can replace your computer before it fails in old age, but sometimes a computer fails early. Sometimes you spill a drink, or your cat does it for you.
And sometimes you forget your laptop in the TSA bin at the airport.
You can probably come up with a dozen different ways you’ve seen a friend, family member, or coworker lose or wreck their device. The chances these things might happen depend on your life. If you never take your computer out of your house, you won’t have the chance to forget it somewhere, or have it stolen out of your car. Plenty of things can still happen at home that can cause your computer to be damaged, and there’s always the risk it will break on its own.
Natural disasters and severe weather are risks that shouldn’t be discounted. I can only speak of my knowledge of the continental US, but most places have a risk of flooding. And, since you probably have indoor plumbing, that’s another chance for water damage. I have to worry about earthquakes and tsunamis, but not snow/ice storms, tornadoes, or hurricanes. And everyone has to worry about house fires.
There’s also the possibility that your data still exists, but it’s been damaged or changed. A mother of a virus might be ripping through a major story file, or your cat took a nap on your keyboard when you went into the kitchen, or an OS update just goes wrong. I had to reinstall Windows 11 because a (real! nonsketchy!) Steam game just…messed everything up to the point my computer wasn’t usable anymore. Backups are for more than just making sure your data is there; we want your data to be unaltered.
There are plenty of ways your writing can be damaged, lost, or destroyed in ways that you cannot predict and cannot prevent. And, with climate change, these risks will be changing, and you might even have new risks to worry about some day because of how your life changes.
What disaster looks like
For a qualatative analysis like this, I like to break impact into two parts:
- What would the heartache be if this happened? and
- What would the headache be to get things back to normal?
If you’re a newer writer of short fiction, and you publish everything on your website as soon as you finish it, losing all your data on your PC means you’ll only lose a couple WIPs. You can save what you posted online if you ever need it as a Word doc again. Which will be annoying, but managable.
But if you’re working on a novel that hasn’t been shared with anyone? That will be absolutely catastrophic.
If you’re in the habit of sharing stories with critique partners, you probably have copies of stories in random emails or Discord messages. If you submit work to publications, then you can pull copies from Submittable, too.
If you look hard enough, you probably have some things in random places. But there’s going to be a lot of writing that will be just gone. I know that, for some people, they might see this as a blessing in disguise, to be able to start a story over from square one. This is not the case for everyone, and especially not for every story.
If you are a writer/editor under contract, losing all of your work might have serious financial consequences. But, even if you’re only a hobbyist, losing everything is going to hurt, in more ways than one.
The additional benefit of backups
If your data lives in more than one digital place, that means you can work on it in more than one physical place. For example, I can send out a submission while I’m at the office, since my writing is backed up in the cloud. If I’m working on my reMarkable in a cafe, I can check a world-building document on my phone. And if I’m at a writerly social event and someone says, “Hey, let’s do a reading!” I can quickly pull something up and look super prepared!
I didn’t realize how useful this was until I started backing up everything on the cloud. I’m sure you can think of even more ways to do so.
How to Actually Do Backups
The longstanding rule of thumb for backups is the 3-2-1 rule:
- Three copies of your data (one you’re actively working on, and two you aren’t)
- Two different places
- One copy off-site
With modern computing, things have changed a bit. Backing up to floppies, ZIP drives, and CDs aren’t very viable anymore. You probably have at least two “computers” (a smartphone and something else, like a tablet, laptop, or PC), and, as a writer, you might have fun little gadgets like an Alpha Smart.
A modern 3-2-1 approach for a writer might look something like this:
- Copy 1: your laptop, where you do most of your work (this is your “production” copy and what you want copied to other locations)
- Copy 2: your desktop computer or an external hard drive
- Copy 3: Dropbox
The purpose of an “off-site” copy is so that, if something happens in your general area (like a natural disaster), there’s still a backup that’s safe. Sending off backups and restoring from them used to be a huge pain because you had to physically move items, but now it’s trivial.
There’s a ton of options for this: Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud+, Google Drive, Dropbox. Depending on your devices, some might work more seamlessly than others, and each have their quirks. Personally, I can’t stand that you must put your files in the “Dropbox” folder, because I want all of my stuff synced. Whichever one you pick doesn’t matter, and, once you set it up, you won’t have to think about it anymore. Each service will have plenty of documentation on how to set them up on each of your devices.
What “two different places” means is less-clear. It used to be “two different media,” like your hard drive and then a CD…but physical media isn’t viable anymore. Instead, it’s easier to think of it as having your data in two different places in your workspace.
Example: You have your hard drive inside of your computer. You could make backups on the same physical drive by making a new partition, but you’ll be in trouble if the physical drive fails.
You could have a second physical drive inside of the same computer (this is more for PCs than laptops). If your primary physical drive fails, then you’ll have a backup. Instead of a drive within your computer, you could use an external hard drive, a USB stick, or even an SD card to store your backups.
The nice thing about an external-y device is if you need to leave the house in a hurry, it’s much easier to grab a flash drive than your entire desktop.
Implementing non-cloud backups can be a little more tricky. MacOS comes with [Time Machine], while Windows has [File History]. They’re free and should already be on your computer, but they might not be the easiest to use or have all the features you might want. There’s more options out there, both paid and free, and it’ll take some research to figure out what works well for you!
How often should you backup?
A business, when planning to deal with risks, will figure out a “recovery point objective” (RPO). This is the maximum length of time of data they’re willing to lose, and this informs their backup strategy. If a company has an RPO of 4 hours, then they need to be making backups every 4 hours.
For a writer, your RPO will probably be 1 day, so you should set up your backup software to make backups at least once a day. For cloud storage, your changes will be backed up as soon as they are made…assuming you’re connected to the Internet. This is a setting you’ll want to pay attention to when you’re setting up your local (“second place”) back up software.
Of course, you can make backups less often if you’re willing to accept the risk of losing more days’ worth of data. You can backup more often if you can’t tolerate losing a whole day of work. And you can always make an ad hoc backup as needed, like before you update your OS.
Closing
With so much of our lives living in digital spaces, backing up is critical for everybody, but especially writers. It’s easy to think nothing bad will ever happen and justify not taking the time to set things up…but the consequences can be catastrophic.
Even if you’re not worried about putting the pieces back together, consider the additional flexibility offered by creating backups. You’ll easily be able to access your files away from home, giving you more options for working, submitting, and sharing.
So take the time to set up your back ups! Future you will be glad you did.
Next time, we’ll be talking about archiving: the long-term storage of data you don’t plan to change.
Caveats
The offered solutions mostly focus on user-friendly GUIs and doesn’t get into the different kinds of backups. There’s lots of options out there, like RAID arrays and incremental backups, but if you already know about those things, you don’t need me to tell you!
Same deal with making your own “cloud” server, setting up cronjobs for backups, and the like.
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