Tag Archives: cloud

by DAVID E. BOOKER

I hope as a writer you know the importance of backing up or saving in a different location copies of your work.

Typewriters had carbon paper. (Yes, I am old enough to have used that.) Early computers had floppy disks. (Yep, I used those, too.) Now there are thumb drives and external hard drives and even back up services such as JustCloud or Dropbox. Many of the cloud services offer free storage up to a set amount, often 5 GB (gigabytes) or something like that. While 5 GB doesn’t sound like much, you have to understand that stories, novels, poems, essays, and articles don’t take up much space. I used to keep many short stories on one 1.44 MB (megabyte) diskette.

But say you don’t have the time or inclination to store backups in the cloud and you can’t afford thumb drives or even an external hard drive. You still have a relatively inexpensive option for saving backup copies of your work simply by sending it to yourself.

After you have completed your writing for the day, send an e-mail to yourself and attach the Word, Text, Open Office, etc. document you have been working on. You can create a folder in your e-mail account for each writing project or one folder for all the projects. You could probably even create a separate e-mail account to which you only send copies of the writings you are working on.

Setting up an e-mail account is not hard and it’s usually free, and as I said, documents heavy only with words don’t take up much space and should be easy to send as an attached file. For example, a novel I am working on entitled Dead Man Love is only 161KB for roughly 25,000 words, and it takes 1024 KB to equal 1 MB.

Plus, the one advantage of sending yourself a copy is that you have a snapshot of where you were on that particular draft on that particular day, so if you date the e-mails you send to yourself, you could find an earlier copy with something that you might have removed that you now want to put back.