Save Your Work!

When you’re a writer, you rely on computers to get your work done and to keep your documents safe, but then a nasty virus compromises everything you’ve worked hard on. Don’t wait for a virus to attack, or for your computer to fizzle out and die, to take action on protecting your documents. Do it now, so you won’t suffer any setbacks or heart ache.

Here are five techniques you can do to save your work and protect your computer:

           1.  Drop Box

Drop Box is a website that you can use for free. All you have to do is sign up and install the Drop Box program to your computer or laptop. By following their instructions, you can link Drop Box to all of your devices: Your work computer, home computer, laptop, and even your cell phone. You’ll get a nifty icon with a luminous blue box, and this box is where you can send all of your important documents. You can do this by dragging the document to it or by right clicking on a document and clicking “Send to” and then “Drop Box”. When you do, not only is your work automatically saved to your Drop Box file on all of your devices but to your profile on their website. You can easily access your documents by opening the Drop Box icon on your desktop or by going to their website, and whatever you do to those documents will save everywhere!

FYI: If you use the documents on your computer instead of the version that’s in the Drop Box folder, you will have to send those updated files to Drop Box again to save the current copy. That's why I recommend for now on using the document saved in your Drop Box folder. And then, later, you can send it to your computer to have it in your computer's files.

 2. OneDrive

Similar to DropBox, you can download OneDrive to your devices and use their website to save the content on your computer/laptop. You can also access your files on any of your devices.

3. Email your documents to several accounts.

This isn’t as easy as Drop Box, but it is another thing you can do to ensure your stories are saved. This technique is better for books that you have put on the back-burner and won’t be working on anytime soon, as you won’t have to keep emailing yourself the same document every day.  

        4. Create two accounts on your computer.

The Administrator’s account on your computer should be the only one you use to write your books/stories, and the other account you should use for the Internet. Doing this will protect your documents in case a virus compromises the account you use for the Internet. You will be able to safely delete that account from the Administrator’s account. I do this, and I’m glad that I did because I once had a virus that was so bad I couldn’t even enter the account I use for the Internet. If that had happened to the other account, and if I had lost all of my work, I would’ve been devastated!

           5.    Paste in your passwords.

This may sound silly to you, but I’ve had my Facebook profile and two of my email accounts hacked in the space of two months. I was even locked out of my Yahoo email account because of it. I found out that hackers can actually monitor what your keyboard does and that’s how they can steal your passwords. (Same goes for keyboards you use with the mouse.) So now I have a document on my computer with all of my passwords and when I have to open my blog, emails, or Facebook accounts, I copy the passwords with my mouse and paste them in. I’ve had no trouble with hackers since!

FYI: So far, the only sites this doesn’t work for are Goodreads and Amazon, but everything else is perfectly fine with me pasting in my passwords.

          6.    Flash Drives/External Hard Drive 

You may wonder why you need to use a flash drive if you’re using Drop Box. Well, what if one day Drop Box goes away? That’s why I still use flash drives diligently. You just never know what’ll happen in the future, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Mark a day on your calendar a few times a month to back-up documents you've worked on.

An external hard drive asks just like an internal hard drive. You can save everything on your computer to it and keep it as a back up in case something happens to your current hard drive. Just make sure to periodically update it.

Also See: Computer Problems

QUESTIONS: What do you do to save your work? Have you ever lost your documents/computer to a virus?