Also, for the love of all that’s holy, use proper surge protection. Ideally a UPS (uninteruptable power supply) – it’ll not only protect your computer from power spikes, but if you lose power, they have a built-in battery that will run the important parts for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on the quality of the unit and how many things you plug into the battery-powered outlets.

For offline backup of stories – Google is cheap and simple. Either email it to a gmail account, or put them into Google Docs – ideally in an account with a name nobody will guess that’s only used for that one purpose.

I have been writing on it for the past year or so and other than scheduled updates that they usually run on latenights every few months, the system is good for pounding out your work and it has the ability to export in multiple formats so that you can run it through your full version word processor.

The abilty to send the file to muliple users via the share document link system in this web app is a recent update that I have taken advantage of when I want to share my work in progress.

Whenever I update my story, I download it to both of my computers and work on the web version knowing that even if the computer crashes and or is lost, I have a current copy that I can get to at a moments notice. That is why I use this type of system, just out of practicality.

Shannon

Google disk is particularly handy.

I’m a fan of Time Machine too, unfortunately, that’s the hard drive that crashed. My Mac consistently eats Time Machine hard drives–a problem I hope to solve when I replace my current laptop some time in the next month or two. But even with Time Machine it really makes sense to back up offsite.

Offsite is key to any serious backup plan. Single site backup is subject to problems from fire, theft, flood, a lightning stirke that takes down both primary and backup hard drives because they’re both plugged in the same house, tornado, etc.

Redundancy is also key. I know too many people who have had backup software go mungy and only found out about it when a primary storage failure led them to discover that there single point backup system was also toast. Writing only the directory and writing corrupt data are two big problems that a munged single backup system is prey to, especially when the primary system goes corrupt slowly so that it starts overwriting good backup data with bad. That’s why I store copies of the WIP on a gmail account and do the CD backups and keep an 8 gig USB drive in my pocket.

If you’re lazy about backing up like I was, you need to know that the question is not if your hard drive will die, but when. A typical hard drive has a life of about 3-8 years. That means if your computer is 3 years old, your hard drive could literally go at any time, and there will be nothing you can do to get your data back.

I use DeltaCopy to automatically mirror my files to a network drive elsewhere in the house. Once a month, I make a copy of that mirror to a third place.

Unfortunately, I’m still lazy. I need to copy that mirror off-site in case of robbery (fire’s not really a problem here; all the houses are brick and concrete), but it’s gigs of stuff and our internet connection isn’t strong enough for me to upload it all. Gotta figure something out though.