Where do you store your work(s) in progress?
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- V-miller
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Where do you store your work(s) in progress?
I have spent countless nights fearing the loss of a flash drive with my unfinished/finished works and stressing that someone else will take what I've done and pass it off as their own. Other times I have lost work saved on flash drives due to either misplacing the drive or something about it no longer working, thus not allowing me to access what I've written.
The notebooks are nice, but I am not organized enough to keep all my writings on one topic in one notebook. Instead there are often bits and pieces of various things from characters, book outlines, full pages of information, or random grocery lists or packing lists all jumbled together into one notebook.
As I'm working to rearrange several rooms in my house and get my writing studio officially in place, I want to find a way to keep better track of what I write. Anyone have any great ideas they'd like to share?
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My main computer, where the work is actually done, stores the master copies of the files in an EXT4 filesystem with an ordered journal mode and some other tweaks, encrypted with a LUKS (aes-256) security system. This makes successful theft or catastrophic poweroff less likely.
I have a differential backup protocol with all my data. The computer gets cloned weekly and the same data is stored in at least three different hard drives at the same time. I have a version control procedure, so I can rebuild my computer to any state back to at least 4 months, more or less. The backups are stored in different cities so natural catastrophe is less likely to wipe all the data at once. Tar and rsync are my preferred backup tools.
Of course, my publishing middlemen have additional copies of the books.
I don't trust cloud based backup systems. They are cheaper or free, but I cannot easily move +300Gb of data or clone a whole system in less than 24 hours with them. It also gives away any control of the files to a third party, which I think is not acceptable when you can have absolute control buying local storage media. Priorities, though, vary from person to person.
- Fran
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My admiration for Tolkien, Tolstoy et al has greatly increased after reading your post
A world is born again that never dies.
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- jsinard42
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I also sometimes forget which folder I have stored some little tidbit of work in, which is annoying but not fatally so. I keep separate folders for different sets of characters, for market-ready works in acceptable submission formats, for stuff that's been sold, and for one-off story ideas that aren't part of any of my "character families." This is all on flash drives.
On paper, in separate folders in a notebook, I keep character lists, timelines, story ideas and fragments, and research notes. For me, this is just easier to access than minimizing my work-in-progress window to hunt around the computer files for a specific detail. I can grab the notebook and start flipping through things until the right one catches my eye.
I'm not into storing stuff online. I suppose that's fine if you are always certain of having a dedicated internet connection, but I rely on wifi, which can be a major pain, connection-wise, so I don't mess with online storage.
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