How I Learned That Backing Up Your Work is a Good Idea
Unfortunately for me, I found out the hard way…
Working on a website that has its own story builder is a wonderful quality-of-life feature. The fact I can log in to Medium at any time on any device that supports it and read, edit and publish my drafts is a feature that I am incredibly grateful for.
However, I recently learned the hard way that this cannot be taken for granted.
A platform that I have been writing on for almost three years, much like Medium, features a studio that gives writers all kinds of different formatting options, such as adding text, images, videos, embedding Tweets and more.
This website announced the other day that it would be closing down, and I was absolutely devastated. I posted frequently to this automotive news/social media hybrid and had built up a good following. I wrote over 260 articles and generated just under 4 million views, and all of a sudden they decide to close their doors.
After the shock of the shut down had sunk in, I immediately started to panic when I realised that the hours and hours of work I produced to start by journalism career was going to go down the drain.
Thankfully, the staff thought of this and programmed an option into the studio to generate a PDF for each article. While this is greatly appreciated, I have found that the generation of the PDF sees some images get broken up over two pages occasionally, and some embedded content can mess up the formatting. I am very much relieved that I am able to keep all of my work for portfolio purposes, but it is still going to take hours for me to save all this work to my computer…
The quick and easy solution
As I said at the start of this piece, having a studio is a wonderful quality-of-life feature; but, putting an extra bit of effort in to saving work to your computer as soon as an article has been published will save you hours of work in the future if a website you write on unexpectedly shuts down.
There are multiple ways you can go about doing this. Firstly, you can use a document program to save your work, in which there are several options available. MacOS users have access to ‘Pages’ being pre-built into their devices, though other options that work on both Mac and Windows include Microsoft Word (paid), Google Docs (free, up to 15GB) and Apache Open Office (free).
Alternatively, you can right-click anywhere on your page and ‘Print as PDF’ on both MacOS and Windows to save to your computer instead — yet this can be messy if the page has adverts on it or the images get cut in half.
Finally, you can save each article as a web archive, meaning you can still view the webpage, even if the website fails to exist.
Using any of these methods to save your work is highly recommended, as you won’t have to deal with the stress of potentially losing all of your hard work should a website close down. I personally prefer to save as a document, but as long as you can see your content, anything will work.
Factors to consider
While these methods are a great way of saving your work, you still need to consider where your work actually is. For instance, Google Drive is completely cloud-based, meaning your work is stored on Google’s servers somewhere on this planet. If anything were to happen to this server, such as a failure or a fire, you could also lose your work forever. Microsoft Word can also have this issue if you use their cloud service.
If you do save to the cloud, try and keep a copy saved to your computer as well. You can do this in Google Docs by pasting your story into a document and going to File > Download and selecting your desired format.
If you don’t have enough space on your computer to store all of your work, consider purchasing a reliable external hard drive to save your data to, and keep it in a safe place so it doesn’t get damaged. You could also start a portfolio website, and make your work accessible on there (though this also runs the same risk as saving work to the cloud, and copies should also be made).
It is also worth noting that a second backup may be worth it too, just in case your computer fails.
Final thoughts
Taking the extra step to save your work locally to your computer is definitely a time investment you should make. Making a habit of doing this every time you hit publish will pay off one day, and can also make sharing copies of work very easy. If you really care about your work, consider saving your drafts too!
It has taken me over an hour so far to save just 80 of my 266 articles for this other website, and I am frustrated with myself for not thinking of saving my work earlier.
Don’t make the same mistake I did — save your work. You might not be as lucky as I have been…
