Every so often, someone will email our support queue because they have lost a significant amount of work to some disaster or another. Sometimes the disaster is Scrivener-related, sometimes it isn’t, but our first question is always the same.
Do you have a backup?
Sadly, depressingly often, the answer is no. And in those situations, sadly, there really isn’t much we can do to help. This post is a public service announcement inspired by one such situation.
Scrivener’s automatic backups are a good start. The Scrivener -> Preferences -> Backups pane has the relevant options, and this is a good time to make sure they match the way you work. If, for example, you tend to leave a project open for days at a time, “Backup on project close” probably won’t offer much protection.
However. Scrivener’s automatic backups are the beginning, not the end, of a good backup strategy. Something that corrupts the live project can corrupt the backups, too, and will continue to do so until you discover the error. And of course backups on the local hard disk are vulnerable to theft, physical failure of the disk, and so on.
Dropbox is useful, but it is intended to be a synchronization service, not a backup service. Damage to one copy of the project can propagate to all of the synchronized copies. In one case, a user forgot to de-authorize his work computer when he changed jobs. When his former employer wiped the hard disk, they wiped out both the “cloud” copy and his own local copy of his work. Dropbox by itself is not a secure backup strategy.
So what is?
First and foremost, if you have a Mac you should be running Time Machine. It comes with every copy of OS X, it’s easy to set up and use, and it works. There’s simply no excuse for not using it. support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250
Second, any data that you absolutely can’t afford to lose – financial records, your thesis, your novel – should be backed up offsite. Once upon a time, that meant keeping a stack of floppy disks in a safe deposit box. Now, there are a variety of offsite backup solutions. As noted above, the list does NOT include Dropbox. Rather, a good solution should work like Time Machine: automatically keeps a static archive going back as far as your disk space allows, preferably encrypted and password protected to prevent accidental or malicious deletions. Restoring data should be a deliberate act, requiring active user intervention, not something that happens automatically in the background. (This is the key difference between synchronization and backup.)
In addition to these automatic backups, it’s a good idea to take a separate backup to an external hard disk before making major system changes, such as hardware or operating system upgrades. If you don’t know how to do this, please learn before you even consider participating in ANY beta software program, including ours, but especially OS X betas.
Yes, this is a long list. No, it is not exhaustive. But all of these steps are easy to take, inexpensive, and will dramatically increase the security of your data. As well as dramatically decreasing the likelihood of depressing conversations with our support team.
Thank you for your attention,
Katherine