One weekend while I was at a conference, Dropbox had a major service outage. This wasn’t a huge problem for me, just an inconvenience. For others, not so much.
Dropbox is an online storage service, and a lot of writers use it as their main backup. A glitch in a maintenance program led to some of the company’s servers having their operating systems upgraded while they were in use. This led to a crash Friday evening that eventually took the whole service down for the better part of the weekend. Service wasn’t fully restored until Sunday afternoon.
I was using Dropbox to move my lecture notes from my MacBook, where I wrote them, to my iPad, where I refer to them in class. So if I hadn’t found a work-around, I could have just taught from the MacBook instead of the less bulky iPad. No big deal.
When it works, which is almost always, Dropbox syncs the contents of your Dropbox folder to your various devices. I have it on an iMac, MacBook, iPad, and iPhone. You could put it on a Windows box and an Android phone, if that’s what you’re into. You can also access it via any web browser.
I was able to use another method to get the file from my MacBook to my iPad, so this outage wasn’t a huge issue for me.
My friend—not so lucky. He used Dropbox to move his data from an old computer to a new one. Wiped the old hard drive…and then the new one crashed and had to be wiped and reset. The files were in Dropbox, but he couldn’t get to them until the outage was fixed.
I want to make it clear that no one lost data in the Dropbox outage. We only lost access to our data, which is almost as bad. But the Dropbox computers that crashed were the ones running the application, not the ones storing the data.
Nevertheless, the whole experience reinforces the necessity of having redundant backups. We all have horror stories about writing a great scene or story that later disappeared in a hard drive crash. In my case, an entire short story vanished into the ether because when we restored from the backup, it wasn’t there. We were doing weekly manual backups back then, and the backup hadn’t been run between the time I wrote the story and the time of the hard drive crash.
Hard drives are mechanical and like other manufactured goods they WILL fail—it is just a matter of when. A high-quality hard drive can last up to 10 years—I’ve even seen a few little engines that kept chugging longer than that with some TLC. But that’s highly unusual and not secure enough for your unique creative work.
Usually the hard disk drive (HDD) in your desktop computer can be expected to last 4–7 years. An external backup drive or one in a laptop will have a useful life of around 3–5 years, because they are at greater risk from dust, jostling, and even dropping. If your computer’s internal drive is a solid state device (SSD), it will have a longer life because there are no moving parts. But they still have a limited number of read-write cycles (the number of times you access information from the drive or save information to it), so they do still wear out, usually in 5–10 years.
That’s why the best approach is to keep redundant backups. That is, not one backup of your file, but two: one onsite and one offsite. If one fails, you can use the other. And yes, I have had a backup drive fail; luckily it’s not a horror story because I had a redundant backup.
The onsite backup is faster at restoring a file in those cases where, for example, you accidentally delete or overwrite a file. It will also help you when you either upgrade your computer or have to replace the hard drive because it dies. Once the new computer or hard drive is in place, you can restore your data from the backup and be in business relatively quickly (depending on how much data is in your backup). If my friend had an onsite backup in addition to his Dropbox backup, this would have made restoring his hard drive much less of a horror story.
Ideally, you want something automated that backs up continually, automatically, without you having to think about it or do anything. Microsoft’s Backup and Restore and Apple’s Time Machine both do this. You just need a honkin’ big external backup drive to connect them to. If you use a desktop computer, you can leave it connected and running all the time.
But if your only computer is a laptop, you will have to implement a routine for connecting the backup drive and running the backup software. I recommend making this part of your end-of-day routine. Yes, back up daily. If it’s something you do every day, you’re less likely to forget.
I’ve met writers who use flash drives for backup, but these are really not sturdy enough. They are too easy to lose or break. A flash drive is better than nothing, but I don’t recommend it. E-mailing your document to yourself and then leaving it in a folder in your mail app is not very efficient and doesn’t backup all your other data. It can’t hurt, but it isn’t a robust solution.
Tech support professionals usually recommend getting a backup drive that has twice the storage capacity of your computer. So if your computer has a one-terabyte drive, get a two-terabyte backup drive.
The offsite backup is for disaster recovery. If your house burns down (or is destroyed in a hurricane, tornado, or other disaster), or if for some other reason you lose both the computer and the backup drive, your data is safe in the offsite backup. Once you replace your computer, it will take longer to restore the data than it would from an onsite backup drive, but at least you will have your data. Do I have a horror story? Why yes. We once had a hard drive fail and a backup drive fail at the same time. An offsite backup would have saved us a lot of effort re-doing the lost work. In such a case, Drive Savers may be able to help if your data is truly mission critical, but their service is so pricey you may find (as we did) that it’s less expensive to re-do the lost work than to pay Drive Savers to recover it.
For your offsite backup, a variety of services are available, including CrashPlan, BackBlaze, Spideroak One Backup, and Carbonite. These services are great, and have the advantage of being able to back up absolutely everything on your computer, including the applications, which is great for disaster recovery when you’re starting over with a whole new computer. But they are pricey, and most writers are on tight budgets.
Apart from that one outage (which was years ago now), Dropbox has been great for cloud backups, and it’s free up to two gigabytes, which is hard to exceed if you’re only storing Word files. (If like me you’re also storing photo, audio, and video, the upgrade is worth it.) Alternatives include the aforementioned Google Drive, as well as Microsoft’s One Drive and Apple’s iCloud. All of these services run automatically in the background whenever you’re connected to the internet, so they don’t require you to remember to manually run a backup.
If you haven’t already, establish a system or procedure to either automate your backups or help you remember to back up your current work at the end of each work session. This is an area in which you really don’t want to live through any of your own horror stories.