Where do you store your manuscript for safe keeping?
I think it was Alan Bennett who once said that when he went on holiday he would put his work-in-progress in the fridge for safe keeping. If the house burned down surely this metal cabinent would keep his manuscript unsinged?
Sounds to me as if the fridge option was from the days of the typewriter. Imagine - only one copy of your work-in-progress!
Now we're all digital, of course we all back up - daily? weekly? monthly? We have copies on memory sticks, external hard-drives, the CD you burned and sent to your mother.
Last week my computer was on the blink [best not to ask, something to do with RAM] so I started to back up frantically. I was appalled to see that I hadn't done a back-up to my external hard-drive for nearly a month.
On the same day I was willing my computer to survive until the man-who-comes-to-fix-it could get here I discovered Dropbox.
Dropbox is a virtual storage space located on a so-called 'cloud' ie it's somewhere in the ether, not subject to theft or fire [I don't think].
I immediately signed up. You get 2GB free - more than enough to store several novels worth of manuscripts, notes, work-in-progress. If you need more GB you pay a modest fee.
I dropped everything in my new Dropbox folder so that, had my computer crashed completely, I could have gone to any other computer - in the library, begged my son to take pity - signed onto my Dropbox account through the interent and accessed all my files. I could work on them and it would save all the changes in Dropbox and on my computer hard-drive.
Each time I work on a file in Dropbox it's always backing up as I go!
I've no idea what happens if the cloud bursts - don't ask!
Keep a hard copy in the fridge? Just in case ... Click here to find out more.
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