Writing Ranting – Backup Your Work FFS!

I don’t know why, in this day and age, people can’t wrap their heads around backing up their work. This is another rant prompted by a forum discussion I saw a while back where a fellow writer had lost their work when their laptop died.

When I recommended a cloud backup and physical backup, the person didn’t take kindly to my suggestion, claiming clouds are not backups. I used to work in IT, so I think I’d know what classes as a backup. Yes, they’re out of your control in terms of maintenance, which I think was the point the person was trying to make in a unappreciative way, but they are a copy of your work that you can access should your PC die. They’re as reliable as any backup can be. I’ve had Google and Onedrive for years and haven’t had any issues.

Also, having 2 backups makes more sense for me personally since I can use my cloud for live changes and synchronisation between my devices, and I can use a physical hard drive for a secondary backup. My Onedrive serves as a 3rd since I have more storage with my Microsoft 365 subscription.

So why do I need Google and Onedrive? Well, Word is a much better and faster word processor than Google in my opinion. It has more features and is easier to use on my laptop. Chrome can be a little slow with large documents, but if I want to edit a chapter at a time, then the editing extensions on Chrome are better. I can use the free version of Pro Writing Aid or Grammarly for SpaG checks and some stylistic improvements. I use Natural Reader’s text-to-speech extension for reading flow and just another way to “read” my book so I might pick up on something that isn’t so noticeable when reading.

So when backing up, clouds have more benefits for everyday use, but I would never suggest someone only use a cloud. Double backups mean double the security and less worry if your computer suddenly dies. Just log on to your cloud on any computer or browser, and it’s all there.