- It's an author's worst nightmare.
That moment when your computer takes
an unexpected permanent leave of absence,
or someone steals your computer,
or you dump an entire Grande America coffee on it
making it go (imitates explosin).
Whatever catastrophe has hit, the end result is the same.
Your manuscript is gone, poof, vanished.
With the possibility of unrestrained
cyber warfare in the air,
and all the other things that can go wrong
when you're writing a book,
I think it's smart to look at your backup strategies.
If you wanna make sure your hard work is saved
in the best possible way than this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey, there I'm Julie, The Book Broad, founder of
the fabulous professional self publishing services firm,
Book Launchers.
Now, if you're thinking, "It's cool
my stuff's all in the cloud."
Let me ask you,
do you really know where the heck that cloud is?
Is that where Jack took his bean stock,
or is it some server farm somewhere on earth?
And are you certain that cloud provider
has a backup scenario to cover your work
in the that a hacker takes monumental revenge on them
and puts some sort of funky virus
into their system that hits your manuscript in the cloud,
but also hits your local copy.
Dramatic? Maybe.
But I believe it's possible.
I've also lost things that were in the cloud,
just couldn't find them.
So I don't trust clouds.
- (slurps) I'm right here.
Just send your stuff right up.
Plenty of room, bro.
- So here are my tips
for taking an extra step to protect and preserve your work,
especially when you get to major milestones
like that finished first draft,
finished editing, finished layout,
and the final version of your precious book.
All right, tip number one.
The bare minimum is to save a hard copy on your computer
and put it on a thumb drive or a hard drive
and save it in the cloud.
All of that is good stuff
and it should be fairly automatic with your setups.
I have Backblaze creating a backup of everything
that's on my computer.
Dropbox backs up everything I have as well.
And I periodically put important documents on a hard drive.
I'm also using Atticus for my latest manuscript,
which is being backed up straight to their cloud.
So it automatically saves there too.
Tip number two, consider saving your entire book
as a .txt or a text file,
because malicious codes can't really hide in a text file.
I personally don't do a text file at every phase,
but when a book is done,
I do it as a last kind of version of a backup
'cause even though you'd have to reformat it,
it's better than losing everything.
Number three, go old school and print it out.
Better to have it in some format.
And there are some OCR,
which is optical character recognition scanners,
that are really solid,
and absolute worst case scenario,
you can scan it in and bring your work back to life,
if you need to.
Number four is just keep everything up to date.
The software programs are always updating,
trying to plug holes
that hackers could use to get at your things.
So, make it a habit to install all pending updates
to your operating systems, your phones,
and any other software that's in wide use.
And while you're at it,
make it a practice to update your high value logins annually
and update any passwords to strong ones.
I use 1Password to randomly create crazy passwords
for all my important sites
when I'm going to do updates.
Number five, whatever you do
make sure you don't have just one backup.
Whether you do some or all of my suggestions,
I'm not telling you to panic
or freak out after every change,
but a little preparation can go a long way
when it comes to reducing your vulnerabilities,
and keeping your hard work safe and sound.
What do you do to protect your work?
Let's chat about it in the comments below.
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Now YouTube thinks you really must watch this video next.
And if you've seen that
or you're looking for something else
about protecting your work,
how about this one on copyright protections?
Either way, both are awesome.
See you soon.