Freelance Writers and Bloggers: Are You Backing Up Your Stuff?

The Freelance Writing Jobs blog you see here isn’t exactly complete. There are three different times I lost a bunch of blog posts. The first time was in 2007 when we lost more than a few posts after switching from Blogger to WordPress. We also lost several months of posts after the great server crash of 2008, and we lost a few posts after a crash in 2009. During the 2009 crash, though, we were able to rescue the posts thanks to our feeds and Google caches. The other times, they were lost in the abyss.

These things happen. The problem is when they happen during times I’m lax in backing up my stuff.

I always have good intentions. I’ll back up every week for a month or so and then forget for a while, which usually backfires. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade it’s that not backing up your stuff is to tempt fate. Now, I make sure it doesn’t happen. I have an external hard drive, plus use flash drives. My book is saved in four different places and my blog posts are backed up regularly as well. In addition to the aforementioned external drives, there are plenty of places to store your stuff online. I’ll also save my most important document or writing to Google Docs.

Are you backing up your writing? If so, what methods are you using?

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Posted

April 19, 2010

Productivity Tips

david

Tags:

bloggers, freelance writers, Freelance Writing, freelance writing jobs

Comments

9 responses

Phil

April 19, 2010

Hate to admit it, but I’ve been very bad.

That being said, I talked to a doctor friend of mine who has tried both of the online backup sites Carbonite and Mozy (there are others). He swears by Mozy, which I had been considering.

The good thing about backing up online or “in the cloud” is that your data is protected if you have a natural disaster — and we’ve had three 100-year floods in the 22 years I’ve lived here (there was another one 7 years before that).

Reply
Christopher

April 19, 2010

I have a plugin that saves the database for my blogs every week. That way if something does happen I’ll only lose a few posts at most.

For my other writing, such as articles and whatnot, I have the files on my computer along with back ups. I don’t always back up like I should but I try lol.
.-= Christopher´s last blog ..The OMV Weekly Retweet Roundup April 18th =-.

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Erik Hare

April 19, 2010

I do it manually every time I think of it. Last time I did it was … let’s see … wait, I’m thinking of it now. Hold on …

🙂
.-= Erik Hare´s last blog ..I Report, You Decide =-.

Reply
Shevonne

April 19, 2010

I always back up my files. The methods I use are having an external hard drive, a virtual hard drive, emailing it to myself (I use Gmail)
.-= Shevonne´s last blog ..April 16, 2010 Interesting Links =-.

Reply
poch

April 20, 2010

I think backing up on external drive is best.
But backing up as draft on your own site then
transferring later is what I do.

Reply
Janed

April 20, 2010

I backup every evening with a usb drive. When I leave the house the usb drive comes with me. When I’m working on very large file, in my translator/editor role, I also periodically email myself the files to a webmail address just in case.

All this came about because last year I had an unrecoverable hard drive failure (so slaving the hard drive and recovering the data that way wasn’t possible) – and no backup routine. I lost LOTS of data, useful emails, invoices, a translation I was working on – and the client for that particular job, who was understandably rather annoyed.

I know that my backup routine isn’t foolproof, and I keep hoping that one of these days I’ll get round to doing a major fortnightly or monthly backup as well, but I suppose it will take another catastrophe for me to actually do so!

Why is it that we are so bad at being disciplined about backups?

Reply
Tim Smith

April 20, 2010

I use a service called Humyo.com, which is based here in the UK.
The app is great and backs up files in the background, and I’ve had very good service when I had to contact them.
My laptop died just before Easter and it’s been odd how relaxed I am about it, knowing that my files are safe.
I also backup to a NAS and to an external hard disk.
Remember, a file doesn’t exist until it is in at least 3 places!
.-= Tim Smith´s last blog ..Bass, not boring =-.

Reply
Jennifer Escalona

April 26, 2010

I use Mozy.com, and it absolutely saved my bacon back in November when my husband dropped my laptop.

Reply
Colin

April 28, 2010

Guys, Im using humyo.com. I got 10GB of storage – which works out 5GB for docs and 5GB for media – so I can backup my business plan.

I worked out that it has a share function so I can share the folder with the docs in via an email invite with my business partner. They offer 100Gb for £5 a month, but it depends how much you need and Im happy with my 10GB!

Reply