Save your work as a Freelance Writer
Are you the type of person who is paranoid about losing their work? Hopefully your answer is yes. As a freelance writer you should get into the habit of saving your work on a regular basis. If you don’t do this it will probably bite you in the neck sooner rather than later.
I got a wakeup call a couple weeks back. My part of the country was hit with a giant snow storm. In turn, the power was going out from time to time. Since I made it through the large part of the storm unaffected I figured there was nothing to worry about. But of course, I was wrong.
I was in the middle of writing a feature article, had yet to hit save, and the power blew. After a few minutes it came back on and I rebooted my computer. While I was glad that everything was safe with my machine, you guessed it – all of my work was gone. At that point my only option was to start the project over.
It is so silly to not save your work. It only takes a second to hit the save button, but for whatever reason many of us forget to do so from time to time. I learned my lesson a couple weeks ago, and am now trying to make a conscious effort to save my progress every few minutes. Has anything like this ever happened to you?
February 24th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
“Has anything like this ever happened to you?”
Once or twice lol I do try to remember to save now, or use an autosave feature if the software has one. I also back up on to disc and Dropbox, so I’ve always got another copy if anything goes wrong before I submit.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Of course! Among other technical problems that happen to appear just when you are on a roll. However, I have a secret love affair with Google Documents, Bless them for having the auto save feature, they save your document every minute or so. Sometimes, I transfer the Google Doc into a word doc after it’s finished. Yeah that may take more time, but it is worth it-rather than writing the whole piece over again.
Kate, I like the idea of back up into a Drop Box, I have to try that out.
February 24th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
It is so important to save your files. You’ll also want to create an organized backup. I talk about creative these kinds of archives and maintaining them at All Freelance Writing: http://allfreelancewriting.com/2010/02/18/freelancing/general/implementing-maintaining-and-tweaking-an-organized-archival-system/
June 8th, 2010 at 10:08 am
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