Right now, I store in the, I gather, now-old-fashioned media of diskettes. (I had to buy a separate drive unit for my last new computer, or lose everything I'd written on my old computer up till then.) Right now, the just over sixty thousand words of my novel fill up just over half of the diskette---but I'm afraid it'll run longer than the space available and I'll lose it all trying to transfer it to some unfamiliar new storage medium. (Once a month, or oftener if events warrant, I make a copy disk.)

As far as backups, I have some experience with that, so I'll offer some friendly advice that might help everyone. It's human nature to slack off, so you have to have a good backup system that you follow religiously. Three backups for the most paranoid: one kept with the device, but separate, and two others kept off-site. Like I said, this is for the paranoid among us, like myself (probably because I deal with computer systems and critical data daily), but two would do for most everyone with only one kept off-site. What I do is keep one on a flashdrive with my Laptop, one on a CD at work, and another on a CD at home.

As a final word, I would suggest using multiple kinds of media as well, as in a flash drive and CD's, DVD's, or floppies, as even flash drives can fail, and even get corrupted as the files are copied. Also, if you're going to use floppies, make sure you replace them regularly. The magnetic material does degrade over time and with use, so if you're backing up often on the same disks, sooner or later, you're going to lose data. The better the disks, the longer they'll last, but it's like playing Russian Roulette with your data. If you have multiple current backups when one fails, it might not be so bad, but if the floppies aren't checked, and all the backups are on them, you may get a nasty surprise when you find out that none of your backups are good.

She'd been mulling over a story for some time in her head, finally got it straightened out, and sat down to write about 3500 words--the whole thing--in a single sitting. At that point, before she'd saved anything, her little boy, still smarting over an undeserved (he felt) disciplinary action earlier that day, came over and pulled the plug.

She just sat there and cried. She couldn't do anything else.

It's a macro for Microsoft Word that creates versioned backups.

Since you can specify two backup locations, you can have one be on your local drive and the other on a network drive or flash drive. Or you could combine it with NetDrive to back up to an FTP location.

It supports three types of versioning:
1. Number: My Story Title (v.1).doc (Version numbers increase with each save.)
2. Date: My Story Title (2007-01-30).doc (Only one version per day is kept.)
3. Date/time: My Story Title (2007-01-30 12.03.17).doc (Date and time are included in the filename. The time has "." instead of ":" because of filename limitations.)

I've assigned the macro to Ctrl-S on the keyboard, so I use it instead of the normal file save.

Of course, source control is not a normal tool outside of the programming profession...

Is anyone aware of authors who use a "programming" tool like CVS or Perforce? Those tools maintain a revision history of an input file, showing at each "commit" what changed, line-by-line. The user may retrieve any version, and compare it to any other version, at any time.

Most coding tools expect plain-text (not Word) files, so that probably eliminates most literary authors out of the gate. They are easy to set up -- though again, not necessarily for those outside the computer profession...

I am happy to help someone set up a repository, or even host one free-of-charge. russ - at - undef.us if you're interested...