This post is all practical today. About backing up your work. First of all, since you’ve all heard it before – do you have backups of your work? Your writing, and anything else digital?

But this goes beyond the standard ‘back up all your work’ stuff.

I do all my drafting in Scrivener, because it gives me the ability to move around entire chapters easily. And I do that more than I’d like to admit. When I finish a draft, I export it to Word so I have a copy of what was before, in case I need to go back and grab it in revisions and I’ve already deleted it.

Keeping oodles of writing drafts is about the only thing in the entire world I’m really uptight about. I save a new file every time I start a new draft and/or start deleting large chunks of text.

I did that yesterday. I got all done with a draft and saved it to a Word document so I could go back and start slaughtering my Scrivener version.

I went to open that Word draft this morning. I wanted to print it because I decided I wanted to do this round of editing on paper.

It was blank. I hadn’t exported the file correctly. I had an empty word document that was my most recent draft of my story. And what was even better, I had backed up the empty word document into my secondary backup spot.

So, that’s my lesson learned and shared. Backups are fantastic. Just make sure they’re working.

Fortunately for me, I had a paranoid moment yesterday where after I made my word backups, I also made a Scrivener backup and it wasn’t blank. But I suspect one of these days, the one where I get lax again, will be the one where I lose several weeks of important revisions or rough draft.

Do you backup your work, or is it something you always tell yourself you can do later?