Pete and I have both signed up for writing challenges this month. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where people all over the world (I guess, originally, it wasn’t international) attempt to pen a 50,000 word novel (which is short, for a novel) during November. If you manage it you get a certificate and a 50,000 manuscript to polish and publish or use as a door-stop.

Pete and I have both signed up for NaNoWriMo. If you want to be our writing buddies then stop my my profile or his. You’ll also find our current word counts there.

We’re both NaNoWriMo Rebels – neither of us has any intention of writing a novel. I’m working on a book about gardening and Pete is calling his endeavour NaCoWriMo as he’s opting to write 50,000 words of web content during the month.

Anyway, I’ve written 1690 words this morning, and Pete isn’t out of bed yet. Not that I’m gloating or anything – that would be dangerous because Pete always responds enthusiastically to that kind of challenge and Word War I will break out in Cooper Towers.

What I am doing is reminding NaNoWriMo participants, and writers in general, that it’s very important to back up your work. Save as you go along, sure – there’s nothing worse than Word crashing and taking hours of your work with you – but you also need to consider hard drive failures and the kind of catastrophic stupidity that involves overwriting your entire work with junk or blank space AND THEN SAVING IT OVER YOUR ONLY COPY, which I have done more than once.

So, back-up options:


  • Hard drives. If you’ve got more than one hard drive in your computer, back your files up to the other one, simply by copying them across. Do it every time you finish working on your project. Put the date in the filename, so you have a record of what it was like evey day. You can delete them later if you need the space, but for now it’s helpful to be able to roll back. You’re now protected from hard drive failure, but not house fires, sorry.

  • CDs and DVDs. Your computer may have the ability to write to blank CDs and DVDs. They’re cheap and they’re easy, but remember to label them well and store them somewhere sensible, or you won’t be able to find your back-ups when you’re stressed.

  • Memory sticks and pen drives. Like CDs and DVDs but reusable. Slightly more prone to failure and infinitely more easy to lose.

  • Email. Just email yourself the file, or the text. Store it in a folder. This only works if you have web-based email, or you use your work address, so that the message is stored on a different hard drive. But it’s quick and easy and free.

  • If you’re lousy at remembering to back-up then you need an automated system to do it for you. Your computer may well have one, but if it’s backing up to the same hard drive your work is on then that’s pretty pointless. Invest in an online backup service for your precious files. Mozy.com is free to home users who don’t need much space (perfect for NaNoWriMo manuscripts!) and we can get you a good deal on their paid services if you sign up using one of our codes.