My Novel Writing Backup Strategy

If you haven’t thought about your backup strategy for your novels, now is the time. Especially if you use Scrivener. I’m a big fan of Scrivener, but a downside to their approach is that your project is a single file. If somehow that file is corrupted, your whole project is toast.

So, what do you do about it?

Step one is to connect your project to Dropbox and keep it synced. If you’re doing your work on iPad (or iPhone), you’ll need to do this manually after every writing session with the push of a button. After you finish your word goal for the day, hit the sync button.

Why Dropbox? Dropbox is the service that Scrivener is designed to use. Also, even in the free tier, you can 30 days of versioned backups. What does that mean? It means if your project file somehow gets corrupted, you can go back to a version you saved within the last 30 days that still works. You can extend that period by paying for a higher tier, but I’ve never paid for Dropbox.

Upon completing my last two novels, I saved a copy of that draft and put it in a separate folder. That’s going to contain the project as well as the notes I make after finishing said draft. This is all meant to just sit there for a while.

I copy this folder to some form of external storage.

Remember, backups aren’t there in case your house burns down (at least, not the ones you keep in the house). They’re in case your computer suffers a hardware failure. Either you spilled coffee into it or the computer was just a lemon (happened to my wife twice). In any case, copying the folder over to another physical device is recommended.

There is software that will do this for you automatically - Time Machine on the Mac, for instance. It will allow you not only to copy everything to external storage, but it will also version it for you. So, just like with Dropbox, you can go back in time to an earlier version of all of your files.

Novel writing is hard work. Don’t lose your baby to a disk failure. Back up your stuff!