As you hopefully are aware, I’ve done a fair bit of writing and publishing. Currently, this activity is now waiting for new inspiration to arrive, but the days of a new book certainly will come again.

When I’m not writing, I’m active on several Facebook groups on various subjects, and have also joined and am active on several writing groups. A frequently recurring question in several of these groups is from folks tragically having lost parts of or complete manuscripts. In close to one hundred percent of these cases, no copies of the work in progress (WOP) were saved elsewhere.

What’s the problem?

Writers of documents, whether they be books or business documents, generally save a copy while working on the document. For business writers, every company they work for has a solid backup and recovery procedure in place. These procedures should be put to the test regularly, as a company I worked for found out the hard way several years ago. The backup and restore procedure had been in place for years, but remained untested. The loss of an important document and the subsequent inability to produce a recently saved copy of it demonstrated this problem and triggered better procedures for backup and recovery, including regular tests. Obviously, it was too late for that particular document, but at least future documents were safe now.

What methods are used?

Writers, amateurs and professionals alike, seem to rely on a variety of methods to safeguard their work. Here are a few:

1. Assume the word processor safeguards the document
2. Email the current document to yourself after each writing session
3. Save a copy of the document
   1. on the computer
   2.  on an external drive
4. Relying on the online platform to safeguard their document (in other words, no strategy)
5. Google Docs will take care of this for me

What can happen?

Nothing can happen to your data, right? Most of the time, that is true, but only until it is not…

In case you do not think anything can happen to your document, here are a few to think about:

• Your house burns down
• Your writing laptop
  • is stolen
  • dies on you
  • get a ransom virus
• Your email account is hacked
• Your online disk space provider goes out of business
• You lose the thumb drive you use for saving your work

Examples of bad luck:

• If we take the first one, your house burns down, and your computer and thumb drive are both in that house. That would imply that all of your work is gone forever.
• Remember the time in 2012 when the FBI rolled up the Hong Kong and New Zealand-based company ‘Megaupload’, losing all customers’ data in the process? No data was ever made available for any customer after taking down Megaupload’s servers.
• In the case of Google Docs: How sure are you that Google indeed will get you a restore of a recent document you somehow lost?

So, I think we can all agree that bad things can happen to your documents.

What is required?

In order to ensure you will not lose documents or parts of documents, you need to have a solid strategy how to handle your files. As you may have guessed by now, I work within IT. As such, I recommend to always have access to the original document and two copies of it, where at least one of the copies is stored off-site.

In my case this implies:

• My working documents are on Dropbox, where I can access them with my laptop, but also with my telephone. (I use a free 2Gb service, which should be more than enough for any writer.)
• After each writing session, I save an extra dated copy of the full document on my writing laptop
• Once every while I save a copy of my writing documents on
  • an external drive
    and
  • a thumb drive on my keyring

Surely I do not need all that?

Perhaps not. But in case you did, then you’ll be thankful for making the effort.

The reason for my writing this post is that the same question is asked regularly on Facebook groups for writers:

Help! I’ve lost part of my document. How can I get it back?

Last week, I met at least four of these questions. Apparently, many have not given saving copies of their work much thought. I hope that the above can help you improve on that.

Paul
2025-08