Don't Forget to Save!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Do you remember the news story from a few years ago when a very famous novelist lost a laptop containing the draft of her work-in-progress? I remember being astonished that such a thing could happen to an established writer, who really should know better. 

In the dim and distant past, before ‘Windows’ was even a thing, I took an IT module for my accountancy foundation course. I remember the lecturer drumming into the class the most important lesson of all: ‘Save, save, save!’. There wasn’t even any internet then to back up our files to, so we used the 1980s equivalent, hard disks. Then we had floppy disks, then pen sticks, and finally ‘the cloud’. 

Most of us have probably had some kind of digital catastrophe. More than once, I have accidentally pressed the wrong button and seen my words disappear in front of me backwards, letter by letter.  It’s scary when you see hours of work vanish like that. A close relative of mine was unable to meet the deadline for a flash fiction competition because she couldn’t find where on her laptop she’d saved the draft of her work.

Looking after our digital lives, particularly our precious writing that we’ve laboured over for so long, is good stewardship of the resources gifted to us by God. We need to take as much care with preserving our writing as we do with looking after our bodies and our homes. 

No system of digital file storage is perfect. I’ve got all of my writing stored in a dedicated writing software, for which I pay a modest annual subscription. I can access it from my phone, iPad, desktop computer and laptop, anywhere with an internet connection. That’s really handy for being able to write anywhere and anytime, but I’m sure my clever, digitally savvy daughter would have something to say about my complete lack of external backup. What if the internet fails, or my chosen software has some kind of catastrophe? I likely need to get myself a hard drive, which would put my daughter’s mind at rest!

But putting the thought of backup aside, how do you organise your writing? Have you, like me, found software that will keep it all in one place, accessible from anywhere? Or have you got random Word documents all over your desktop, waiting until you make time to organise them? Perhaps you are old-school and write with a quill pen or tap an ancient typewriter with two fingers? Have you got cupboards and drawers stuffed with notebooks, and post-its all over your house with ideas scribbled on them?

The software I use is called ‘Ulysses’. Designed for Apple devices, it was the best on the market at the time in my judgment, but that was seven years ago. For me, it was a toss-up between this and  'Scrivener'. Ulysses won because, at the time, though Scrivener only had a one-off cost rather than an annual subscription, saving it to different devices wasn’t simple, and it was a more difficult system to learn. Ulysses is an easy interface with the ability to export into different formats or to publish. It also has a spell and grammar checker integrated into the package, and can be used with the Grammarly desktop app. The developers are constantly tweaking and improving it. 

I would be interested to know if, in today’s market, there is anything better than Ulysses. If you know, please tell me in the comments! On a quick browse through recommended software, I came across one called ‘LivingWriter’. It does come with a monthly cost, but it looks like a good upgrade from where I am at the moment. It also looks like Scrivener may have been updated. I’m going to do some research and perhaps report back in another blog post…

Meanwhile, happy writing and don’t forget to save, save, save!