Friday, February 17, 2017

Do You Have A Backup Plan?

My authors are awesome. There isn't a week that goes by when one of them give me inspiration for a blog post. Sometimes what they provide me is inspirational. In other cases, it is a word of warning, which is what today is about...


One of my authors had a situation recently where the story she was working on (and I should note was doing really well with) ran into some difficulties. It was the infamous "computer failure". She had thought everything was good, but sure enough, over 5 chapters of hard work were lost. Not good. She was not happy about that in the least bit.


But things like this happen. When we work with technology, problems will occur. So, with that said, it is always good to keep a couple of back-up plans at the ready.


I am someone who firmly believes in saving your work in multiple locations. Save it to the "cloud". Save it on flash drives. Save it on your hard drive. Email it to your agent. Email it to your friends. And yes, every now and then, print it off!


I would also encourage you to set the Auto Save Function on your computer to a shorter time. Right now, the default on MS Word is set for 10 minutes. This is when the computer kicks into life and saves the work to a temporary file. If you are someone who writes really fast, shift it to every 5 minutes or so.


To find this command, here are the steps.
  1. Right click on the top bar where all of the commands are located.
  2. Click on Customize Quick Access Toolbar
  3. On the left side click on the SAVE tab
  4. You will see the AUTO RECOVER option there. Change that and then hit OK.
I should also note that another option here is to change the DEFAULT option to something other than the computer. That way if the whole computer crashes, you can still get to it. You can change it to a flash drive or even the cloud.


Just some "techy" stuff to consider.

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