Let’s Back Up a Bit!

The gentleman in the picture is wearing suspenders and a belt. While this is not a great fashion look and people might make fun of him, that’s less embarrassing than his pants falling down because of a wardrobe malfunction.

I have a server at a large hosting service that runs a number of websites, including our main business—a commerce site. Last week the server started getting errors on the primary disk drive. This is a webmaster’s worst nightmare. They had to shut the server down, taking all my sites offline, and back up all my accounts to my secondary drive. Then they copied the backup drives to a cloud account. This is called a “redundant backup”—a backup of a backup. Belt and suspenders.

Then they installed a new hard drive; installed the operating system on it; and restored the accounts from the cloud backup. Almost. One of the cloud backups was corrupt. And of course it was the most critical one—our commerce site. The one that pays the bills.

No problem, there are backups on the secondary drive, right? They were able to restore the commerce site from the disk backup. We were down for almost 24 hours, but we were able to resume business.

What does this story have to do with writing? Only everything!

Where do you keep your writing—your Word or Vellum or Scrivener files? On your hard drive? That’s a recipe for disaster if you computer fails, not to mention a hassle if you get a new computer. On an external hard drive? That’s better because your files aren’t stored on your computer at all. But there’s still only one copy of your files, and external drives can fail too.

Cloud backup is a better solution. Keep your files on a Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive account. Your data is always there, your files can be synced across all your devices, and you can access your accounts through a browser.

Life is wonderful now! Until you’re facing a deadline and suddenly you can’t get to your cloud files. Your account has been hacked and you can’t log in. Or the service is completely down. (Even Google has experienced outages!) Your suspenders have snapped off, and your pants are about to fall down. You need a belt! You need redundant backup. You need cloud-to-cloud synchronization.

There are services that can sync files across multiple cloud accounts. Some of them have free accounts if you’re using free cloud accounts. Here’s an article that compares some of the best services.

Best Cloud-To-Cloud Management Services in 2024: Unify Your Online Storage

Horray, your writing is secure on multiple backups! Are there any questions? Yes, you in the back… what about your website? How do you take redundant backups from your server? Uh… good question! We’ll cover that in next month’s post.