Julie Broad shares five backup strategies for authors: use local and cloud storage, save a plain text copy, print physical drafts, keep software updated, and maintain redundant backups. Tools like Backblaze and Dropbox help, but the core is having your manuscript in multiple places so nothing gets lost.
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It's an author's worst nightmare. That moment when your computer takes an unexpected permanent leave of absence, or someone steals your computer, or you dump an entire Grande Americano coffee on it, making it go. Whatever catastrophe has hit, the end result is the same. Your manuscript is gone. Poof. Vanished. With the possibility of unrestrained cyber warfare in the air, and all the other things that can go wrong with when you're writing a book, I think it's smart to look at your backup strategies. If you want to make sure your hard work is saved in the best possible way, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad, founder of the fabulous professional self publishing services firm Book Launchers. Now, if you're thinking it's cool, my stuff's all in the cloud, let me ask you, do you really know where the heck that cloud is? Is that where Jack took his beanstalk, or is it some server farm somewhere on earth? And are you certain that cloud provider has a backup scenario to cover your work in the event that a hacker takes monumental revenge on them and puts some sort of funky virus into their system that hits your manuscript in the cloud, but also hits your local copy? Dramatic maybe, but I believe it's possible. I've also lost things that were in the cloud, just couldn't find them. So I don't trust clouds.
I'm right here. Just send your stuff right up. Plenty of room, bro.
So here are my tips for taking an extra step to protect and preserve your work. Especially when you get to major milestones like that finished first draft, finished editing, finished layout, and the final version of your precious book. Alright, tip number one, the bare minimum is to save a hard copy on your computer and put it on a thumb drive or a hard drive and save it in the cloud. All of that is good stuff, and it should be fairly automatic with your setups. I have backblaze creating a backup of everything that's on my computer. Dropbox backs up everything I have as well, and I periodically put important documents on a hard drive. I'm also using Atticus for my latest manuscript, which is being backed up straight to their cloud, so it automatically saves there too. Tip number two, consider saving your entire book as a. Txt or text file, because malicious codes can't really hide in a text file. I personally don't do a text file at every phase, but when a book is done, I do it as a last kind of version of a backup. Because even though you'd have to reformat it, it's better than losing everything. Number three go old school and print it out. Better to have it in some format and there are some ocr which is optical character recognition scanners that are really solid and absolute worst case scenario. You can scan it in and bring your work back to life if you need to. Number four is just keep everything up to date. The software programs are always updating, trying to plug holes that hackers could use to get at your things. So make it a habit to install all pending updates to your operating systems, your phones and any other software that's in wide use. And while you're at it, make it a practice to update your high value logins annually and update any passwords to strong ones. I use 1Password to randomly create crazy passwords for all my important sites when I'm going to do updates. Number five, whatever you do, make sure you don't have just one backup. Whether you do some or all of my suggestions. I'm not telling you to panic or freak out after every change, but a little preparation can go a long way when it comes to reducing your vulnerabilities and keeping your hard work speed safe and sound. What do you do to protect your work? Let's chat about it in the comments below. When you comment, you put yourself one step closer to being one of my valuable besties, joining an elite and awesome club with Rachel Robertson, Efren Delgado, Linda K. Lee, Allen West, Stephen Serrell and cat Lind. Now YouTube thinks you really must watch this video next. And if you've seen that or you're looking for something else about protecting your work, how about this one on copyright protections? Either way, both are awesome. See you soon.
