I believe that there is a law in the universe for backups:  frequency is directly proportional to data loss, i.e., about the only time you really get serious about doing backups is when you’ve had a crash and lose your files.  Or, to put the less negative spin on it, the more often you do a backup, the less data you lose.  You know it.  I know it.  It is a law after all.  We’ll call it the Universal Backup Law.

Flirting with Disaster

In July of 2005, a Harris Poll survey found that 35% (more than a third) of US adults with personal and professional digital information stored on a laptop or desktop, never backed up their files.  Never.  Not once.  Zero.

Per the Universal Backup Law, in the event of a theft or a crash, they are guaranteed to lose data.  In fact, per a corollary to the Universal Backup Law, the crash gods will take special pains to find them.

Are you one of these people?

Are you a writer?

If you’ve answered yes to both of those questions, read on.  Otherwise, feel free to test your verbal skills and donate rice here.

The Writer’s Special Dilemma

People are really annoyed to lose digital data that they’ve paid for:  audiobooks, movies, TV shows, music files, ebooks, and all the rest.  Ooh it’s annoying.

Other people are really distressed to lose personal information:  address books, financial stuff, and very cool RSS feeds.  How tiresome to enter it all again.

Some people are traumatized by losing photos:  the kids, the folks, the wild office party from three years ago.  Maybe you should have printed some.

But writers, when they lose what they’ve written, it’s pretty much the end of the world, or at least that work day.  You know that, as a writer, you will never, ever, in a million years of constant writing, be as brilliant as you were when you wrote those perfect words, capture exactly the same thing that you captured when you first wrote them, and you will certainly never be able to remember what you wrote, verbatim, even if it was only three minutes ago.  It is calamity on a vast scale.  By the way, compulsively hitting the save button is not really a backup.

Let us agree that manually doing backups is a pain in the ass.  We’re not here to talk about automated backups.  We’re here to talk about cheap.  So, let us agree that backups are a pain in the ass.

But, as writers, let us also agree that losing writing, no matter how small the amount, is a small butcher knife twisting slowly in the lower abdomen that brings your writing momentum to a full stop.

Which pain is worse?

Free Is A Good Price

So what is a frugal writer to do?  E-mail yourself.  Yahoo! Mail offers free and unlimited mail storage (Gmail offers about 7 GB).  As a writer who wants to back up writing, let me give the Tattoo Encyclopedia as an example.  As a finished Word document, it clocks in at 713 KB.  Yes, the good thing about writing is that text documents are generally very small.  You could send it as an attachment or possibly even copy and paste it into the body of the email.  As far as attachments go, you could even attach photos.

The hitch here is that you’re limited to a 25 MB email message.  Depending on the resolution of photos, that’s not a lot of photos at once.  Then again, this is really about cheap writing backups, not how to back up your life.  Note that a lot of articles will tell you to use free services like flickr and Photobucket to store your images, but neither allows you to store high resolution images or long videos.

Thumbs Up

If you’re willing to fork over enough cash for a Disney movie on DVD, then you can afford a thumb drive.  In my quick survey of the top 25 thumb drives (aka, flash drives) sold at Amazon.com, you’ll see that for about $15 you can buy 8 GB of storage.  Doesn’t sound like a lot of room?  Again, from a writing example, virtually all of the research that I did for the Tattoo Encyclopedia was dumped into a Filemaker Pro database.  It contains every image and piece of text that I gathered as research for the book (some 1,500 entries), plus the text for the actual book, everything that tattoo artist Greg James illustrated for the book, and I add to it all the time as I come across things.  The file is currently 155.5 MB.  I could store 50 files this size on an 8 GB thumb drive.

You’ll see from my table, where I calculate dollars per GB, or bang for the buck, a 16 GB thumb drive wins out (a Kingston at $27.47) for costing only $1.72 per GB — these are all USB 2.0, by the way.  Don’t be too charmed by that number though.  You don’t really generate superlative bang for the buck until you buy many GBs.  A 500 GB external drive might cost something between $75 and $125, but the bang for the buck comes down to a paltry 15 cents per GB on the low end.

Since we’re being frugal writers here, you could look at it both ways.  Why pay $1.72 per GB when you can pay $0.15 per GB.  But, if you haven’t got $100 laying around for an external drive, maybe you could swing $15.  So, while I don’t want to spend $1.72 per gallon of gas when I could be paying 15 cents per gallon, I can probably afford to fill the tank on a Vespa but maybe not the tank on a motorhome.

Now

If you are one of those mind-numbingly huge contingent of people who do not back up, don’t wait for the perfect solution.  Don’t wait for automation.  Don’t wait for the rest of your digital life to fit into your backup plan.  Put your writing somewhere else, anywhere else, right now.  The crash gods are watching you.

All in One

The first and most fabulous feature of Scrivener is that it puts my research, notes, outline, and writing all together in one screen.  Looking back on it, I think this is one of the reasons that I used to use Filemaker as a writing environment.  As you can see in the screen shot below, of my latest tattoo symbol article, I’ve got my research listed on the left, my notes and outline on the right, the article on the top, and the current piece of research that I’m using at the bottom.  Sorry the type is so wee, but I wanted you to see the whole thing.

Scrivener Screen Shot

This arrangement isn’t just eye-pleasing.  Like any good multi-tool, it’s time saving. The biggest improvement in performance that I have seen in my writing (out of the many I’d like to see) is my efficiency.  I work primarily on a 15-inch laptop so real estate is at a premium.  I am sick of opening and closing windows, juggling five applications, and hitting various function keys to see everything that’s currently running.  Sick of it, I tell you.  My favorite thing about Scrivener is how it has eliminated the need for much of that and how much faster I can work as a result.

Compact

When I say that Scrivener brings all of my writing materials into one location, I mean one file.  One.  Whether I’ve imported text files, PDFs, TIFFs, or what have you, they all end up in my one .scriv file.  Now, if you decide you want to take a geeky look inside that file by ‘showing the package contents’, you’ll see all those individual files are still there as separate entities.  But if you don’t have a clue what that last sentence means, then skip it and be happy.  Everything that you have imported into Scrivener, or created in Scrivener, is in one file and you can take it anywhere you go.

Lightweight

Despite stuffing my Scrivener file with all manner of research, notes, outlines, versions, descriptions, and actual writing, it boots like a dream.  Unlike another prevalent piece of writing software, who shall remain anonymous but whose initials are Microsoft Office, have your coffee ready when you sit down to write with Scrivener.  Even files with 60,000 words seem to pop.

Portable

Let’s say you want to share your lofty thoughts with a friend but they don’t own Scrivener.  Scrivener seems to understand that it doesn’t exist in a Scrivener-only universe.  Among its export choices are RTF, RTFD, DOC, DOCX, ODT, FDX (I have never used Final Draft, or any other screen writing software, but Scrivener has many features that seem to have to do with this type of work), FCF, TEXT, and HTML.  If you decide to ‘compile’ your manuscript and have Scrivener do some fancy formatting for you, you get even more options.

Built-in Magnifying Lens

I would never buy a Swiss Army Knife without the magnifying lens.  It’s one of my favorite parts.  The same is true with Scrivener!  Check out how Scrivener helps to save my eyesight, day in, day out.

Scrivener Enlarged Print

And yes, I like the little scissors tool alot too but I couldn’t think of anything clever to say about Scrivener that really worked for those.

But Wait, There’s More

Although a Swiss Army Knife doesn’t have a built-in camera – yet – Scrivener does.  But don’t think of it as a camera, think of it as a super cheap backup system.  You can take a “Snapshot” of your work in progress and go back to it at any time.  It’s just a pull-down menu away, built right into the software.  You’ve got to do it yourself because it can’t be made to happen automatically (there are autosaves as you work though), but I did say it was a super cheap backup system.  I take snapshots before major edits.

Saves Money

But don’t take my word for it.  Go get your 30-day free trial.  That’s what I did.