by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
It’s now time for my regularly scheduled reminder to back up your work.
This time I’ll make my post a little different by urging you to back up other files, too. Although we’d likely be hardest hit by losing our manuscripts, there are other important writing-related things, too.
I’ll start with our newsletter subscriber list since I know folks who have inadvertently deleted portions of theirs (and, in one case, the entire list). I use MailChimp and it’s fairly easy to back up. In fact, you can back up all of your account data (including templates, campaigns, subscriber lists, campaign reports, etc.) in one fell swoop. Step by step guidance can be found here.
If you’re like me and rely on your Google calendar for everything, you’ll want to back it up, too. My calendar has everything from guest posts scheduled on my blog to cover design meetings to podcasts. Backup Google calendar means exporting the calendar (then I usually will copy it to an external device of some kind, too). Instructions can be found here.
Book-related files are also important things to back up. You may think that backing up your current work in progress should be the main focus. But there are many other types of book files that you’ll want to keep track of:
Cover files. I back up my ebook, print, and audio book covers several different places.
Published book files. You never know when a new retailer or format will come along. It wouldn’t be fun to lose these old files.
Back matter. To speed up the publishing process, I keep my back matter (including list of published books, where to find me online, etc.) in a document that I can update and quickly copy and past into the back of the next book.
List of ISBNs. I keep track of all of the ISBNs for my different books (in all the different formats). It would be time consuming to recreate.
Last, but certainly not least, our current manuscript. If you don’t create backups because it’s a pain, think of other, easier ways to save your data. Email yourself a copy, copy to a small thumb drive that you carry on a keychain, use a cloud service like Carbonite.
What kinds of files do you back up? How often do you do it? Is it automated or manual?
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Photo credit: Dolinski on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND