Modern technology is great. It lets me change a character’s name in an entire manuscript with the flick of a button, without having to retype the whole thing. It checks spelling. It lets me send copies of my work to my crit group without spending a fortune on photocopying…and lets me get their comments back in a file I can merge with my manuscript, so I have everybody’s remarks in one place. (And the cat can’t jump on the pages and scatter them all over the floor.) It lets me keep copies of my first/second/third/fourth/etc. draft easily accessible, so that when I suddenly decide I need that one scene after all, I can cut-and-paste it right where it goes now, instead of retyping everything (or worse yet, trying to recreate it entirely from memory). It lets me search for too-similar names, or overused phrases, so I can fix them. Yes, modern technology is great.
Until it isn’t.
This is where everyone thinks of the obvious possible hardware problems and disasters: the hard drive crashes. The floppy disc or writeable CD/DVD is corrupted. The power goes out before the file gets saved and all new data is lost. A random hacker/thunderstorm/server-farm-disaster messes up the Cloud storage. Something goes wrong during a save, which corrupts the save file as well as the new data one was trying to save. A fire/flood/tornado destroys the house and the computer that’s inside.
But there are also possible software problems. Again, most people think of the obvious: An assortment of possible bugs in the word-processing program, which may or may not do to a file full of words the sort of thing that a food processor does to a container full of vegetables. And there are the “liveware” problems, the sort of easy-to-make-but-hard-to-fix mistakes that can happen even when using a familiar program if one is overtired, distracted, or just not at one’s best.
The obvious solution to all of this is backups, preferably offsite backups. (I’m always amazed by the number of people who not only don’t back up their laptop or desktop regularly, but don’t even bother to put a flash drive on their keychain with, at the least, their latest work-in-progress on it.) But regular backups alone won’t solve the ultimate problem.
Time.
In the past 45 years, I’ve gone from typing my work on a manual typewriter (ugh) through electric typewriters (better) through several types of home computers (and different operating systems), and many, many word processing programs (with incompatible file formats). Every change has been a bit of a pain. Even if I was sticking with the same basic brand and combination of computer-plus-operating-system, I usually had to upgrade all the programs as well, because eventually they wouldn’t run on the new operating system. And eventually, they wouldn’t be able to read the own old files (let alone the old files produced by other, now-defunct programs).
Back at the beginning of my career, people thought I was fussy because every time I got a new word-processing program, I insisted on migrating everything I’d ever written to the new format. Then the first of my writer-buddies had her ancient home computer fail, suddenly and permanently, leaving her with an unfinished manuscript that no modern machine could read, plus a bunch of published titles that she only had in hard copy (this was before e-books). Even if she’d had backups, the word-processing program she’d been using only ran on the dead computer, which was neither Apple nor PC and no longer for sale.
Over the years, I’ve seen this kind of thing happen to many, many writers, and the longer they’ve been writing, the more devastating it is when the only ways to get electronic copies of their early published work are 1) OCR software (which is 99% accurate now…meaning there’s only one typo per 100 words…or 1,000 typos in a 100,000-word manuscript…), 2) paying a lot of money to someone in hopes that they can salvage the data from the crashed/corrupted hard drive, or 3) retyping it from the published work. And if the cause was a total hard drive failure, #2 is the only possible way to get copies of unpublished work, and salvaging hard drives does not always work, or work well.
The solution is, still, backups…but backups in a format that is a stable standard (or as close as you can come). My choice, since the early 1990s, is the *.rtf (rich text) format. It’s not perfect, but it’s been a basic cross-platform, readable-by-everything format for long enough that I’ve been able to skip migrating my entire backlist to at least three new word-processing programs, because they can still read *.rtf files. (And if you think that you’re safe because you use the current incarnation of Microsoft Word…I have a couple of early Word files that the current version can’t read properly. But Word reads the old *.rtf files just fine.)
Remembering to back everything up in rich text once it’s finished is, I admit, a bit of a pain. But those old electronic files have been useful multiple times—I’ve sold some stories ten or fifteen years after I wrote them, and if I’d had to find a way of getting them from the ancient AppleWriter program I wrote them on into the MS Word file the publisher wanted, it would probably have been enough of a pain that I wouldn’t have bothered. Having accessible electronic files has made reissuing old novels a lot easier, too, especially as e-books. And my entire backlist—published and not published—has come through at least one major “negative computer event” unscathed and still readable, because even though some of them were written with no-longer-available programs that used proprietary file formats (or that went back to totally-not-around-any-more DOS programs), I have *.rtf copies of everything except the current work-in-process. And I keep a copy of that on a flash drive on my keychain.
Back up your work. It only takes a few seconds at a time, and if you never need or want it, it’s not a problem. But if you need it and don’t have it, I predict that you will be very, very sorry.
I’m lucky that the shareware program I used in the 80s and 90s created files I can read now, although I have to edit out the formatting characters for italics and stuff.
Then again, almost all my work from that period isn’t great, so… 😉
Very good advice. One more thing I would add: _Test_ your backups regularly.
My fingers and toes probably wouldn’t be enough to count all the stories I’ve heard of people thinking they have a good backup system, but then when something happens, it turns out the backups have been corrupted (hard drives, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, etc. might not be reliable after 5 or 10 years), they haven’t been running at all for the last two years, they’ve only backed up one directory which doesn’t have most of the data, or forgotten the passwords necessary for accessing the backups…
Or the modern computer might not have e.g. floppy disk drive, CD drive, IDE connection for the old hard drive, and so on. That could be recoverable but not always trivial to hunt down compatible hardware.
I guess it counts as a livewire problem, but I’ve seen pictures of a printed book where the publisher apparently wanted to localize “pants” to “trousers” and ended up with the word “occutrousers” on the page.
Also, synchronization is not backing up. If your work is automatically kept up to date on all your devices in Google Docs or something like that, if you accidentally run a wrong find-replace or accidentally select-all-delete on one device, the wrong change will be neatly synchronized everywhere immediately. Some of those tools might keep some history automatically, or might not.
It’s even wise to keep some backlevel versions.
And the cat can’t jump on the pages and scatter them all over the floor.
Though they can jump on the keyboard, creating “interesting” alterations to the text….
Ironically, I was just backing up some diskettes (backups of backups) when I popped over to read the latest post. Yes, I am still clinging to my 1990s-era word processor and 3.5″ disks; the disks are holding up fine, though the hardware to work with them is getting challenging. Part of my backup system is making sure even my oldest software is still accessible in some way — because I like it, and still use it, but also so that the also-backed-up data files aren’t orphaned.
I lost a good chunk of my stories a handful of years ago, and while they were the garbage written by an eight-to-ten-year old, I was devastated when I put my flash drive into the computer, only to find that the information was gone.
As a result, I’ve been a little… over-obsessed with backing things up ever since. For example, I backed up my flash drive last December, not realizing until afterward that I had a backup from last November that was probably just fine.
So, when it comes to backing things up, how often is too often? Is once a year sufficient, or is once every quarter a better policy? I suppose it depends on how much my stories grow in between backups…
Depends on how much progress you have made and how much you are willing to lose. Is it OK for you to lose e.g. everything you made in the last 6 months if some hard drive breaks down? If not, you probably should make backups more often than every 6 months 🙂
My approach is to do a working backup at the end of every writing session — quick copy the file from one USB to another, or from USB to hard drive or vice versa (or diskettes, for me, but yes I’m weird). That protects you from a catastrophic failure of that specific storage device. Then, do a backup of everything on some kind of regular schedule, copying both the main and backup files to a third location. I used to do this every time before I took a trip, which protected me both from damage or loss of the media I took with me, and from something going badly wrong at home while I was gone.
There’s something to be said for *continuous* backups, either to a cloud server or an external hard drive (ideally, both). But that does run into the “synchronization” problem noted by Alpakka above. There is thus also something to be said for keeping at least the most current work replicated on a handy flash drive and/or Google drive (or the like) that one updates every day or so.
Continuous backups e.g. daily to some cloud service or a local file server are great. If you don’t need to think about them every time, you won’t have a change forget making them. Although backing up to multiple different places is very much recommended so you won’t lose everything if you e.g. forget the cloud service password.
If you use some service designed for backups and not just for synchronization, generally there should be options to keep old versions. E.g. keep the last 10 versions, or keep every change for at least 3 months.
I stick to RTF at all times.
Will you add to the Frontier Magic trilogy? If so do you have an ETA. I have enjoyed many of your series. Have fun and I hope to enjoy more of your books.
Thanks
Mike Freeman
It’s unlikely, as I have other projects in process. The next one will be “The Dark Lord’s Daughter,” which will be out next fall. I’m working on the sequel even as we speak.
I saw “The Dark Lord’s Daughter” listed on Amazon. But I wondered about the age range. It was listed as something like ‘six to twelve’. That seemed a bit young for your previous work.
I noticed your mention of OCR accuracy as being 99%. Well, I have been scanning in a lot of books I can’t get any other way and I will say that I wish I was getting 99% accuracy. I seldom get through a paragraph without having to make a correction. I am using Abby Finereader 14.
OCR accuracy is calculated per character, not per word, so no surprise that you have at least one scanno every paragraph. If I scanned your comment at 99% accuracy, your comment would have 2-3 scannos.
I have a batch file that autoruns every day to back up my work to a second internal hard drive and to an external hard drive.
Does anyone know of a utility that will mass/batch convert old word .doc files to .rtf, over multiple directories and subdirectories? The “batch doc to rtf” things I’ve found on-line (or already have as part of Word) will only convert .doc files from a single directory.