Picture a dark and stormy night in a small town. In one home, two young adults are battling it out in a video game. Two blocks over, an architect is on his computer, putting the finishing touches on the blueprints he's turning in to the city tomorrow. His neighbor is settled at her nightstand with her webcam, happily recording a video to send to her husband while he's deployed overseas. On the other side of town, an aspiring writer is at her desk, typing away at the manuscript she's been stressing over for weeks. In the apartment next door, a teenager is online filling out applications for college. Everything is going smoothly.
Then the power goes out.
The convenience of computers and technology have, in some ways, made us complacent. The gamers have lost their progress, the architect has lost his changes, the wife has lost her video, the author all her progress on her manuscript and the teenager all the data he'd already filled out in his application. Hours of progress gone in seconds.
Because none of them thought to save it.
It's the single most important thing anyone using a computer, tablet, game system or mobile device can do, and the one thing my husband is chanting like a mantra every time I play a video game. Save! Save! Save! I am notoriously bad at saving in games. On the other hand, when it comes to composing text on a computer, I save compulsively. Autosave is a handy function, but I have never been confident relying on it exclusively. In the world of publication, saving your work is not just a necessity, but a requirement. Every change, every version, every little thing is saved, backed up in multiple places, and sometimes even printed out in hard copy for archival purposes. Work is always saved, and by everyone who contributes to it.
Yet there are still those who rely on autosave and cloud back-up. To them I say "be prepared" because if you rely exclusively on automatic functions the loss of those functions can cripple you. In the hypothetical situation posed above, if even one person had a back-up generator they could have avoided losing everything they'd done. None of them were prepared, and so all of them lost. As we grow increasingly reliant upon technology for everything from weather to news to shopping, being prepared is a more critical thing than ever.
So for writers, here's my list of things to do to be properly prepared:
One: save often. Whatever you're working on, make it a habit to save your progress every few minutes even if you have autosave enabled. The more often you save, the less progress you lose.
Two: make back-ups. No matter the size of your project, create a back-up of every version and keep it stored in multiple places. Your computer hard drive, a flash drive or external solid state drive, and cloud storage are the three main places you should have back-up copies of all your important files.
Three: use a battery back-up on your computer. These devices have been around for years, and yet people don't often use them. They're a fantastic way to protect your computer, and a great way to get an extra few minutes to save and shut down if the power goes out.
Four: if you want to keep it, print it. Printer ink is prohibitively expensive and storing paper is never as easy as storing digital files. In the end, though, if you want to make sure you always have access to something, the best way to do it is to print it out. Physical copies don't require power to be read.
Five: e-mail is your friend. These days everyone has email on their phones. If you want to make sure you have access to something, send it as an attachment to yourself in your e-mail. Then you can access it from your phone even if you don't have a computer handy, or forward it on to someone else if you won't be able to work on it again soon. It also doubles as another form of backing up files, assuming they're small enough.
When it comes down to it, though, the most important thing any writer, editor, gamer or creator can do is save their work. The worst thing that can happen is losing everything you've spent so long creating.