Writers, Safeguard Those Precious Words

[This article originally appeared in the June 2006 (Vol. 29, No. 6) issue of The Editorial Eye.]

Here’s a roundup of tools that can make your writing life a little less stressful.

Online file backup

Let’s face it: Backing up your files manually is a pain, ranking right down there with cleaning the soap scum out of the tub and balancing your checkbook. We know we should do it, but it’s just so easy to put it off until later. And then the inevitable hardware crash catches us off guard, and a deadline whooshes past while we frantically try to resurrect two weeks’ worth of writing.

I understand perfectly, because I’ve been there. Even with backup software reminding me (nagging me) once a week, I hated sitting there, feeding my PC disk after disk, labeling them, and then toddling off to the fire-resistant file box to put them away for safekeeping. I started putting off backing up until some undefined “later” and suddenly realized that I had successfully put it off for two months. Something had to give.

My first step was to buy another hard drive. Ever-increasing capacities coupled with ever-decreasing prices mean that it’s now easy to find a reasonably priced, voluminous drive. I use an external USB drive for my laptop, but desktop computer users could add a second hard drive devoted to backups. Now my backup software (there are plenty of packages available) automatically backs up my files to the external drive every week.

But what happens if you have a true catastrophe—if a real disaster strikes, and your home or office burns down, or is destroyed by a tornado or flood? If your backups are in the same location as your computer, you’re out of luck, right?

Not if you’ve signed up with an online backup service and are storing your backups on their servers. A search for “online backup services” turns up a huge array of choices, some intended for corporate clients, some for home and small business use. I’m partial to Mozy (www.mozy.com), which offers two gigabytes of free storage on its servers. You download the software, select the files you want backed up, and set up your backup schedule. Mozy silently does the rest, encrypting your files and sending them to the Mozy servers over a secure SSL connection.

And it’s free. The catch is that it’s ad-supported, so if you sign up for the service, they’ll send you a weekly newsletter that includes advertising. You can also sign up for a premium service that offers more storage, but after six months, I haven’t come anywhere close to using up my free allotment. Mozy currently supports only Windows XP, but a Mac version is in the works. Now I have easy-to-get-to backups of my key files right next to my computer, and more backups on a secure server on the Internet. The process is painless, and the peace of mind is priceless.

Keeping files in sync

Another of my headaches over the years has been keeping working files on my laptop’s drive synchronized with copies on a desktop computer, on network servers, or on removable storage devices. Throw in sharing files with other writers and editors, and things quickly become messy. You forget to get the newest copy of this file from the network, or somebody forgot to copy the changed version of that file to the master folder. Next thing you know, you’re trying to reconcile two (or more) versions of a document or trying to figure out which is the up-todate copy.

Here’s the scenario I’m dealing with right now on a contract job. I’m the editor for a team of six writers creating software documentation. The writers are working on about 30 documents, each of which includes 20 to 30 images. All these files are stored in a network folder, and all of them are in a state of flux. How do I keep the copies I have on my laptop synchronized with the ones on the network?

You can manually copy files from one location to another, or you can use batch files or scripts to automate the process, but these methods don’t deal well with files that are renamed, modified, or deleted. A file that you deleted will reappear, or a file that has been renamed will end up alongside a duplicate file bearing the old name.

You could set up a full-blown content management system, but they’re expensive, difficult to administer, and often far more than what many writers need.

Enter SyncToy, a Windows utility designed to synchronize the files in two locations. Not only does SyncToy handle files that are updated, making sure that the newer version isn’t overwritten by the old one, it takes care of other types of changes as well. If a file was deleted in one folder, it will be deleted in the other. If a file is renamed in one, it will be renamed in the other. You can set it up to handle two-way or one-way synchronization, and you can set it up to manage multiple folder pairs.

SyncToy was developed at Microsoft by a team of digital photography enthusiasts (amateur and professional) who wanted a better way to manage the thousands of digital image and video files they had scattered in multiple locations. They created SyncToy to eliminate the tedium of managing their huge collections, and they realized that it worked for more than photos.

I’ve found that I can quit worrying about whether I’ve got the latest copies of documents and images if I’m not connected to a client’s network. Before I leave to work off-site, I run SyncToy. When I return to the client’s office, I run it again, and my changes are duplicated on the network.

For more information about SyncToy, go to www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx. If you need a way to keep more than two folders synchronized, take a look at Microsoft’s FolderShare, a product with a bit more horsepower than SyncToy. For information, go to www.foldershare.com.

Tapeless recording

A few weeks ago, I had a telephone interview scheduled and discovered that my cassette recorder had developed an appetite for tapes. I could have run out and purchased the first tape recorder I found, but I decided to try a completely different approach: I would use my laptop as a recording device.

I knew that any computer with a microphone input (most sound cards include one) or a USB port is capable of recording audio, but I had never taken the time to try it with an interview. I already had a telephone recording controller (an inexpensive device that sends an audio signal from a telephone to a tape recorder). I simply connected the output from the recording controller to the microphone input of my laptop.

That covers getting the sound into the computer, but how do you record it? I could have used the basic Sound Recorder utility included with Windows, but I opted for the audio recording capabilities of a notebook application I use frequently: Microsoft OneNote (www.onenote.com). That way, the interview audio is stored in the same place as my notes for the project. I can make backup or archive copies—to another drive or onto a CD—of the whole works with a couple mouse clicks.

There are a lot of variations on the basic theme of recording on your computer. You can learn most of the fundamentals by reading up on podcasting, which is a method of distributing media files over the Internet. Podcasters have figured out how to record audio on a computer—do a Web search for “podcasting how-to” to learn about the options.

This article was originally printed in The Editorial Eye, 66 Canal Center Plaza, Suite 200, Alexandria, VA 22314-5507, (703) 683-0683.

Copyright © 2006 Roy Jacobsen. All rights reserved. You can print ONE copy of this article for personal use. Other than that, you can’t reproduce this article by any means without written permission from the author.