The Data

Posted on January 29, 2006
Filed Under personal |

One thing I’ve become conscious of is my need to save and backup data. I spent about an hour today going through various folders containing my writing and I know now that I need to come up with some kind of seriously stable, centralized backup system — something that is easily updated, easily synchronized, and easily maintained.

My creative processes are somewhat messy, but not so messy that this would be impossible. For example, I tend to go back and find stories I worked on, partway through, and then left to “percolate”. Once I “finish” them — meaning once I get to the point where I feel I won’t edit any more — I tend do declare stories finished, and I also tend not to go back and edit stories more. This means that my “Finished stories” archive is easy to maintain — it just keeps growing.

But the rest is harder to manage. There are the stories I am working on currently — which includes things I actually am working on, or things I want to work on. There are the stories I plan not to work on again, but which, by some strange twist, I may end up returning to. There are stories I plan to work on more, but which I don’t intend to work on in the near future. All of these I keep in different subfolders.

And now, the kicker: if I was only writing fiction, this wouldn’t be such a mess, but I also have similar categories going for verse projects, nonfiction projects, and teaching materials.

And to make things worse, I am a kind of packrat for drafts. When I make major revisions, I create a new file. While, of course, I always eventually create a compressed archive for drafts and early versions of each piece, this still complicates things a little.

So I think I am going to have to come up with some kind of smarter archive system — some kind of intelligent file-management database system or something — to keep all of this organized, preserved, and up-to-date. In some ways it might be worth investing in a chunk of very well-run, effectively backed-up webspace, and have a database running containing all of this.

In any case, it’s better that files can be backed up by a variety of means. This is much better than in the old days, where one unlucky fire could wipe out an author’s full collection of notes, juvenilia, and unpublished works. Me, I have one set of files on my computer, another on my MP3 player, and I’ll have a third on a DVD-ROM before I go to sleep tonight.

And I think that this semester I will, at the very least, figure out some kind of smart, clean backup system so that, even if there is no optimal way to organize my writing, at least I won’t risk losing any of it, and I’ll be able to find things more easily. And then I’ll do the same with photos, and I’ll be set!

Off I go now, to burn backups of my writing archives. (That is, if I can get them to work on a DVD-ROM: the file paths are so long sometimes the files gank out on me, and for the same reason, compression doesn’t work so well.)

Comments

One Response to “The Data”

  1. Cuccu on January 29th, 2006 11:26 pm

    For offsite backup, may I suggest SyncBackSE? I’m in the process of getting the entire family set up on it.

    Because one fire really would wipe out all my data.

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