How many ways should you protect important stuff? I’m helping a young writer friend get her first book ready for publication and we ended up having a discussion about the various ways to back up your material.
I’m a strong proponent of triple, quadruple, or quintuple backing up writing, especially if you’re writing a book or writer professionally in any capacity.
I use OneDrive cloud storage and I have it mapped so that a copy of everything I write save simultaneously to a folder on my PC and to my OneDrive. I use Word with AutoSave turned on. But I also regularly backup up my writing to a flash drive on my keychain and to a separate external drive that I do daily Windows backups to. I also keep folders in my free Google Drive and Dropbox account.
That’s a lot of back-ups, but this stuff matters to me. Additionally, I also suggest backing up to a physical drive that you don’t keep on your premises. Maybe keep it in a safe deposit box.
While I enjoy the convenience of being able to access cloud files from anywhere and easily share them, my main reason for backing up to the cloud hasn’t got anything to do with convenience.
While my flash drive and external hard drive backups are great for a disc or mechanical PC failure, if there’s a disaster like a fire or storm, my external drive and flash drive are probably going to be destroyed along with my computer. Heck, if the case of a natural disaster, my backup at the bank could be a goner as well.
Having one or more cloud backups gives you a little extra insurance. But don’t just stick to a cloud backup. Things go wrong up in the cloud as well.
Redundancy is your best bet for stuff that matters.