Just an early reminder:
Back up your novel. Back it up early. Back it up often. This isn't like voting - the more times you back up, the better. You want to stack that ballot box with a resounding win for your COMPLETE novel, not just a partial recovery you managed to dig up after spending several hundred dollars at a data recovery center.
Email your novel to yourself. Save a copy to a floppy disk, a USB memory stick, a burnable CD/DVD. Hell, plug your digital camera into your computer and save a copy there, if necessary. Just save an extra copy somewhere OTHER than the computer/PDA/AlphaSmart/whatever you're writing it on. Anywhere. And do it every time you sit down to write.
Here's what I do. Every day, I make a copy of my novel-in-progress, with the date as part of the name. I then work on the new document. This means if my computer crashes or somehow corrupts the file I'm currently working on, I still have the previous copy safely tucked away. And every day, when I'm done writing, I email myself the latest copy of that novel.
Those of you writing by hand or using a typewriter may disregard most of this message. But remember, paper can burn, get eaten by a pet, be used as toilet paper in a moment of desperation, or fall into the wrong hands. So you might want to use that work copier to make a backup of your novel too.
Be safe out there, peoples! Word.
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idunno, co-ML for California :: South Bay
15,069 / 50,000
Oct 12, 2008 - 21 26
Is there anyone out there with a photographic memory who can read my handwriting?!?!?!
50,018 / 50,000
Oct 17, 2008 - 14 38
I have been using Dropbox. It supports both mac and PC. It is a good, free, web based backup system.
https://www.getdropbox.com/
0 / 50,000
Oct 18, 2008 - 08 30
Probably going to pick up a flash drive or two over at Target for when I'm on the road; here at home I've got the Time Machine auto backup for my laptop. Flash drives are really cheap these days -- I've seen them in the Fry's ad for under $10 for 1GB (which is all you really need for a novel unless it's some sort of graphic heavy thing), and you just plug them in your computer's USB port, wait for it to mount and you're good to go.
15,069 / 50,000
Oct 18, 2008 - 15 16
If you have Yahoo email, they have a briefcase that I use as an additional backup. And Google has google docs, where you can save documents Both free.
52,458 / 50,000
Oct 19, 2008 - 21 26
Just remember the Nano mantra: Flashdrive are our Friends!
Time to invest in a new one, methinks....
Melissa
50,082 / 50,000
Oct 31, 2008 - 19 01
And remember, don't count on the flash drives alone. I've had two or three go wonky on me before.
Luckily, Fry's always has some sort of combo pack on sale (I got 4 2GB drives for $30 today), or you can use a flash drive and a Google account, or some other combo.
50,142 / 50,000
Nov 25, 2008 - 14 14
Just bumping this as a reminder.
My laptop freaked and ate my novel file yesterday, but luckily since I backed up I only lost one day's worth of words instead of the entire thing. So yeah, back up.
59,001 / 50,000
Nov 26, 2008 - 22 09
Thanks for that reminder! And there's another, more extreme, cautionary tale on the NaNo Q&A:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3139879
97,638 / 50,000
Nov 30, 2008 - 22 17
Hey, I'm just bumping this up as a reminder and providing a reason to do so.
Today, not long after reaching my goals, my thumb drive suddenly refused to do anything but be reformatted. That meant losing all data on it.
Luckily, the thumb drive was my back up and the thing I used to make a third back up on my desktop. I lost nothing. Don't worry.
So... backup those words you just finished!