The Importance of Saving Your Work
Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned in writing is to back up your work. It seems like such an obvious idea, but few will actually take the time to secure their writings before leaving the computer. I speak from personal experience when I say it is essential to constantly save your work when writing and editing. Here is a bit of a sad story to illustrate the point.
Only a few moments ago, I was in the process of editing a short work of fiction. I reached page seven and found to my amazement that no further pages existed to correspond with my hardcopy. The electronic version only had seven pages, whereas I typed a full thirteen! Where did they go? My memory gently reminded me of some computer error I had a few weeks ago, so I am now supposing the ms became entangled in that situation and half the story went the way of the Dodo. I have not edited in a few days, so the issue was not immediately recognized. When I checked my backup jump drive, it, too, had only the seven page document on board. Lesson One: check the full ms before closing down for the day. You may have an error and could possible restore the document before saving the corrupted file to your disc. I even tried my “doomsday disc” and found I had only two pages saved there. I was out of luck.
It is not a total loss, since I have a hardcopy of the work, and here lies lesson two: always print off a hard copy when you are finished with the story. It is not only needed for editing purposes, but also for the safety of the work. I have a hard copy now, so I can at least retype the document and have it electronically again. It’s a lot of unnecessary labor on the part of the writer, but at least the whole endeavor will not be permanently lost.
Above, I mentioned my “doomsday disc,” a jump drive which I used as the proverbial doomsday vault of my literature, the last bastion should everything else fail. Normally, I am obsessed with backing up documents and I always pride myself on having multiple copies of a single document. In this case, my obsession failed me, and my doomsday vault was found to be empty. Lesson three: always save to such a disc as the doomsday disc when a work is completed (before editing); when you complete a read-through, save it there once again. Believe me; you will thank yourself for it.
Your writing is too precious to lose, and the time put forth into the craft is far too valuable. Keep multiple saving discs and always secure your work, or you will end up like this disgruntled writer who now has to waste time retrieving a story which was already written!
Well, that is all for now. As always, good luck writing!
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6 Comments
Panther, I know what you mean about writing in longhand first. But of course there are terrible stories about manuscripts being lost or endangered. One of my favourites concerns Thomas Carlyle, when he was writing his book History of the French Revolution. He lent the manuscript to his friend, John Stuart Mill, to read. Mill's maid assumed the manuscript was a pile of waste paper and used it to light a fire. Carlyle had to rewrite the entire book but, amazingly, remained friends with Mill. The fate of the maid is not known!
When I first set out to put my novel on Msn Word I hit Ctrl+Z instead of Ctrl+S and wiped out the first 10,000 words! The error was irreversable, all because of a wee typo! I had the original hard copy but it was 20 years old so natch, I'd edited it blind!
Now I use the mouse and click the Save icon every so often. I make a disc backup, a cruzer backup and e-mail it to all my e-mail addresses too! Totally paranoid but determined never to lose it again. :-D
I vowed I shall NEVER be so careless as to not have a back-up again - particularly for my novel. If I lost my 60,000 words I truly do not know how I would get over it. Horrific to even think about! I use a memory stick for my stuff and my brother should have a copy on his laptop for when he's done edits for me :)
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