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.