Backups, Notes, Tablets and Dragons

An author friend of mine recently told me that he had lost all the files he had been working on over the Christmas holidays, when one of his computers had a failure and his USB drive became corrupted while working with it on a second machine.

What surprised me to hear was that the USB drive was holding the only copy he had of all his latest writing. In the process he lost a major work, plus hundreds of articles that were sitting waiting to be used.

What I do with my most important files is to have them in three places: on the C: drive I am working on, plus two external backup drives, solid brand ones such as Seagate or Western Digital, one in an off-site fire-proof safe and one always plugged in to the machine for regular automatic weekly backups. The two backup drives are switched over monthly. That way I always have at least two copies of each file, so that if a drive dies I am only a few days out of information (since the last automatic weekly backup). In the worst case scenario if there is a fire or theft and my two current desktop drives are lost, then I have the backup in the fireproof safe, which may be on average 2 weeks out of date (at worst 1 month).

I have a backup drive for each machine, and automatic backups set to Thu at 5pm on all machines. (you can also set the backups to daily if you want).

I never rely on little USB drives for the master copy of my data as I personally believe they are too unreliable, and are too easily lost. They are so cheap, I worry about the quality control of the factories churning them out in some of those countries. I just use them for temporary backups or temporary transfers between machines.

I have set up the Windows automatic backup on my Windows 7 machines so it backs up every Thurs at 5pm. I investigated the software under Windows 7 operating system and it is very good for both backups and retrieval, as well as being able to browse your backed up files and only retrieve a single file etc, so we’ve standardised on that now. I was previously using PDF 995 but I no longer use that since the Microsoft backup seems very good now.

Our accounting system books is manually backed up to a USB drive at the end of each mass entry session by the bookkeeper, as well as the standard backups.

My precious photos are not deleted from my camera until there is at least two copies on my drives somewhere.

If you need to work on several machines then there is a fantastic piece of software that I discovered recently that they have added into the Microsoft Office Suite called OneNote. It’s a bit like Word except you can paste almost anything into it, like pictures, screenshots, web pages, web links, even whole files, anything. It’s fantastic for authors, researchers, creatives, anyone.

The reason I mention it is that it has an amazing feature that it will synchronise between several machines. I have one set of Notebooks, and I can open them up on any machine (so long as they are networked) and they automatically synchronise with the latest version that I modified on another machine. The synchronising works even if the machines are disconnected (offline) from each other. Each machine keeps its own copy so that you can work on just one or the other and let them synchronise later any time you like.

OneNote is my number one favourite piece of software these days, I use it far more than Word, Excel, anything. It has decreased the piles of paper all over my desk and the best thing is I can find things much faster than I ever used to be able to with the swamp of paper, because it has a great search facility. Best of all, everything is being backed up - so one less thing to think about if there is a fire or flood!

I’m currently synchronising a set of notebooks for work, play, tech tips, writing, art and everything, across 3 machines – my big desktop, my laptop tablet PC, and my little mini netbook that I do most of my daily writing in. Check it out! It comes with the Microsoft Home Office pack that you can buy for an amazingly low price for several licenses. I originally got onto OneNote because I do lots of handwriting scribbling on my tablet PC. So now I don’t need to have a pad of paper at my desk all the time – just my tablet PC!

Also my hubby has just installed Dragon Naturally Speaking (because he hates typing) and it looks amazingly good. You just speak the words and the typing appears on the screen. In any program you might be using, such as Word, Outlook etc. It's very fast.

Jacqui

National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo

After being inspired to write every day by http://www.750words.com/, I am launching on my quest to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November. This is an international event that has been going a few years, check out http://www.nanowrimo.org/.

I have always wanted to write a book, but have not known where on earth to start. I remember as a child dreaming up plots of science fiction stories. Once I wrote an 8 page story as part of an English class exercise in early high school, I remember not meaning to write so many pages, but I got carried away with the story and couldn't stop.  The teacher was shocked at how good the story was and gave me a big red A++ for the mark. It was a complete surprise to me!

As an adult the urge has never left, but I have never known what on earth to write about (in fiction anyway).  I thought it would be nice to write children's books and then illustrate them.

In 2008 I scribbled some charcoal on a blank canvas, thanks to the great art teacher Donald James Waters, and ended up dreaming up a story as I was drawing. I finished up creating a mad Storybook painting called "The Spooking of the Blarts". The Storybook paintings, which have a whole story written and illustrated onto the one canvas, have now become a series (you can see these in my gallery) and will end up in a book. They always start with "Once upon a time in a place light years away..." and they are a lot of mad, silly fun that adults and children both enjoy.

So I found a way to have the creative ideas for my books, by starting with some art!!! Quite the opposite of what I thought (writing and then illustrating!), but it works beautifully.

The novel I have been inspired to write this month is along similar lines, but with a madcap heroine riding an organic self-healing mindreading spaceship containing a moody creative Auto-Chef automatic food-manifestation system that is prone to tears. Kat is on a search and rescue mission to find her mysteriously kidnapped best friend Zask.

I need to write 1667 words per day to reach 50,000 words by the end of November. Luckily I just taught myself touch typing in August so it's getting easier and faster to write almost at the rate my mind churns stuff out than it was before!!! I am sort-of-touch-typing currently up to about 30-40wpm, so not too bad.

This month coincides with my annual Christmas art exhibition (see http://www.artatheart.com.au/) so my daily routine starts with writing for a couple of hours followed by a full day in the gallery.

I can't believe my luck in finding such an ideal life, really, sometimes I have to pinch myself.

Postscript Dec 2010:

Not a bad start for my first year... I have definitely got into the daily writing habit, and have a good feel of what it's like to write in bulk!

At the end of November I managed to make it to about 42,500 words (the NaNo website was clagged up on the last day so I couldn't update the number). I didn't make it to the 50,000 but I did pretty well for the first go at it. The book is really fun, I've renamed it 'Kat and the SpaceBlaster'. I plan to finish the 50,000 words in December and then start editing.