Don’t rely on manual methods, or a flash drive, or emailing the book to yourself. You’re never completely safe, however hard you try, and one day, you’ll get that sinking feeling when you realise that a lot of work is missing.ĭo your backups. It hasn’t failed me yet, but even if it does, I have other backups of my work. Every now and again I go in and delete the files I don’t need any more, but it doesn’t take up too much space. I have it in my Documents folder, so it gets backed up with everything else. Don’t trust one program alone to look after your work.Ĭurrently I use Atlantis Word Processor, which copies the whole file to a folder you can put anywhere you like. At its worst, it can corrupt everything in the backup folder. And it can delete all the incremental files, leaving only a file that is a week old. You’ll see that as a “version.” So if the original file is lost or corrupted, then you’re stuffed again. Some programs do incremental backups, which means they put a new file in place with the changes, but only the changes, not the whole work. If your computer crashes, or the power fails, or you drop your laptop, you can lose all your work. So if something happens between the deletion and the new file being put in place, then you are out of luck. Word, and most of its competitors, deletes the original backup file before it copies the new file in its place. After a lot of digging, I found out what was happening. If I hadn’t been backing it up to a different place with a different program I would have lost the lot, not just one day’s work, which was bad enough. With Softmaker, the program I replaced it with, it happened again.

Several years later I found that Word had deleted a day’s work. I had to write those chapters all over again. I copied a blank file over my work instead of the other way around. This was way back when every household was lucky to have one computer. I lost six chapters from my second book, ‘Devonshire’. But there are ways we can insure against it. It happens to us all, however careful we are. She opened Word and found that she’d lost all her work from the last week. Today it happened again to one of my colleagues. Why I Take Backups seriously – and why you should, too.

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