People always stop me in the street and ask “Sean, how important is it for me to make backup copies of my writing? How often should I backup?”
And I always answer them, Not at all and Never.
Making backups or copies of your writing is a complete waste of time, and resources. It’s also arrogant, but I’ll get to that.
Back in the old days, when PCs were the size of your grandma’s suitcase, and a laptop was something the secretaries in the office gave you when you showed them how to “connect the printer”, backing up meant sitting in front of the computer for hours with hundreds of floppy disks, swapping them through the drive one by one, waiting for the disk with the read/write error that would wreck the whole backup process, often crashing the 10MB hard drive you were trying to back up. Like your college roommate’s ideas on sexual experimentation, “backing up to floppy” was something you only tried once. Unfortunately, hard drives at that time were made from recycled Ford Pintos, and crashed like a drunken teenager trying to drift in mom’s minivan. So from time to time you lost data, and quietly put the blame on middle management trying to mirror the New York Stock Exchange in VisiCalc.
Nowadays, an entire industry serves the needs of the redundancy-obsessed, proving that you can back up your data, but you can’t restore your cash. Let’s look at some of these options:
- External drives and network storage can store hundreds of gigabytes of data, and can back up your hard drive automatically. Why on earth would you want to back up your entire drive? Part of the karma of the occasional drive crash is the opportunity to reformat and start again, without all the dinky little evaluation software you have cluttering up the program menu. You know you’ll end up using it to make “backups” of rented NetFlix DVDs. These drives cost hundreds of dollars, money that could be spent on writer’s conferences, and take up valuable desk space, reducing the number of writing how-to books you have on hand.
- USB thumbdrives and memory cards are just another thing to lose, which is why you end up leaving them plugged in all the time. Sure, you can keep them on a keyring, just like you can get NERD tattooed across your knuckles. Plus their capacity is limited, forcing you to think about what to copy, and how often. Anything that small that isn’t made by Apple just isn’t cool. Do you really want to trust your super-precious backup data to something you can buy for $19.95?
- CD and DVD burners, standard equipment in computers since around 2000, are just factories for drink coasters. You burn a disc, write the date and the word “backup” on it, leave it in a drawer for a year, then one extra guest shows up for your Superbowl party. Apparently beer, salsa and urine can really degrade the optical properties of the outer layers.
- And don’t get me started on paper. They kill trees to make paper. Then they trawl the ocean floor for baby octopi, playing the audiobook edition of Nicole Ritchie’s autobiography on massive underwater speakers until they release their ink – that’s why printer cartridges cost more than the printer. You then fill your basement or garage with reams of undated, unfinished drafts that will only ever be read by the most gullible of your next of kin.
Backup software is another way the computer industry tries to reach into your wallet, while telling you it’s a handjob you’ll thank them for later. A program that routinely makes copies of updated files, storing them on a separate drive, allowing you to easily restore everything in the event of failure? I suppose you need MS Word to capitalize the first letter of each sentence for you, too. If you can’t occasionally open a directory program, select My Documents, hit Ctrl+A and drag to another drive folder, chances are you’re not doing much editing on that first draft either.
Which brings me to my next point. There are only two reasons you make backups:
- You’re so paranoid, you think your computer is out to get you — waiting for that perfect moment, when you think you’ve written something genuinely extraordinary, before blue-screening and taking out the last few thousands words that you thought you’d saved; or
- You think everything you write is worth keeping — even the half-baked ideas, the false starts, the early drafts when the main character was an amoeba, the repository of edited passages you couldn’t just delete because you’re convinced there’s still a little shinola amongst the shit. It’s as if you think your talent is a big jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces will eventually fit if you write enough of them.
Forget backups, I say. If your work was any good at all, it would already be backed up, in a library.
Sometimes, as in the case of this guy, a total hard drive failure is just the catalyst you need to take a brave new step forward with your writing. Either that, or the perfect opportunity not only to stop writing, but to pretend you never did.
![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
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“Forget backups, I say. If your work was any good at all, it would already be backed up, in a library.”
I’m going to spend the majority of my day deciding which font would look prettiest, and then print out that line, have it laminated, and glue it permanently to the wall above my desk.
Are you out of your mind?
For the non-writer, there are dozens of reasons to backup.
For the writer, there are dozens of reasons that have nothing to do with writing, to backup.
I mean, unless you’re one of those Luddites who trusts nothing to a computer in the first place.
But even if you’re the crappy sort of writer who has a pile of stuff that will never see the light of day… it’s almost universally useful to hang on to that old stuff, anyway. Because if you get better, it’s critical to look back and see how far you’ve come. Lose all the juvenilia and other garbage, and it could start to grow in one’s mind, becoming youthful purity instead of youthful garbage.
But aside from all that, if you use MS Money or QuickBooks, if you keep critical information in your e-mail, if you keep address books on your PC, if you store or take digital photos, if you buy digital music from iTunes or elsewhere, or have massive collections of CDs ripped to MP3, if your computer uses hard-to-find drivers, or any of the above (and they ALL apply to me), you should backup.
Granted, I doubt many will actually take you seriously, but this is really irresponsible advice to give.
this is really irresponsible advice to give.
David, that is so sweet of you to say.
Glad you think so, Sean.
David,
You can’t possibly think that this wasn’t written tongue-in-cheek, can you?
I can possibly think it. I can possibly think a lot of things. But Sean’s adamant that it’s not tongue-in-cheek.
From the FAQ:
# This is a gag, right?
I’m deadly serious. I’d break into your house and steal all your pens if I could.
# What’s your motivation?
I’m sick of reading crappy books. I want to cut them off at the source.
Then again, maybe I’m just a humorless asshole whose pet cause is computer backups and hates to see it get mocked, especially when most people are so cavalier about it. Your call.
David, are you saying you are a humorless asshole if Anonymous calls it that way?
Rather than answer the greater question (whether I’m out of my mind), I’ll quote from my own Disclaimer:
101 Reasons is presented “as is”, and is not intended as a substitute for actual writing advice, and
Sean Lindsay makes no warranties or assertions as to suitability or fitness for any particular purpose, other than the smug feeling you get from thinking that I’m talking to every other writer but you.
Far be it from me to gainsay Anonymous, Sean.
After all, he wrote all those great plays, like Hamlet. How could that dude be wrong?
I personally wish no writers would back up their writing.
then, they’d get discouraged when their writing gets lost on massive hard drive failures, floppy corruptions, or internet server crashes.
It’s hard to come back after you lose 80,000 words of deathless prose.
That can ONLY be a good thing.
Oh, and David? Seriously man. If someone is dumb enough to take this advice and never backup anything, ever? They deserve what they’re going to get. Especially when we know for a fact they wouldn’t take any of Sean’s OTHER advice.
Other: Whenever I write something. Completely ignoring Sean’s advice and reasons, I refuse to stop writing. Yet if I backed up only when I wrote something worth keeping, I would never back up at all.
After all, you never know when someone might want to pay for your writing, even if it is total crap.
I don’t know, Sean. I think I’d feel sort of suicidal if I lost my 530,000 word trilogy in a hard drive crash. My trilogy may or may not be crap, but it does represent seven years of free time used up. I want to have something to show for it.
And I work in the tech industry, so I carry USB keychains and stuff around, anyway. It’s too easy to make backups. It takes like 2 seconds.
Great blog, otherwise! You sound like a veteran reader of crappy, unpublished writing. I’ve been there, done that.
Abby, you have a trilogy, with an average 176,000 words per volume, that you’ve been working on for seven years?
You might want to get some prescription painkillers before you open any response to a query.