Charlie StrossFeb 13, 2025

Time for a footnote to this: nearly 40 years of writing my stories on computers has taught me two things:

1. Always have backups. More than you think you need, too (backups can go bad).

2. Always have an exit strategy from a hardware, operating system, or writing software choice: vendors can go bad or remove support for older products.

Sub-footnote: Linux isn't an exit strategy, it's a 9-5 job. Open source is less bad than closed, but rug-pulls are still possible.
https://wandering.shop/@cstross/113995800386923701

Charlie Stross (@[email protected])

Time for Day 13 of #WritersCoffeeClub , many thanks to @johnhowesauthor . How do you organise your writing projects? I work in Scrivener. One project per novel. Possibly supplementary notes in SimpleNote, before I import them into Scriv when I begin writing. Each project lives in a folder along with supplementary stuff, namely generated drafts in export file formats, backups, and so on. Current "live" projects temporarily reside in a separate folder in my Dropbox (for cross-device syncing).

The Wandering Shop
Show threadHugo Mills

@cstross A favourite war-story of mine: when I was writing up my PhD, I ran out of space on my main partition. So I used PartitionMagic to resize it. It failed -- the whole partition was lost. The off-site backup (via dial-up modem to the office every night) was dead because the HD in that machine had failed that morning.

The CD-RW backup had corruption halfway through the disk, and the rest wasn't readable.

The tape backup didn't work, for some reason (I can't remember why now). 1/2

Feb 13, 2025 at 2:49pmWeb
Show threadHugo MillsFeb 13, 2025

@cstross
Eventually, I found the one remaining copy of the text that wasn't on paper, in the CF card in my Psion 5mx, where I'd used it on a long train trip the previous week.

Backups are what all the cool kids are doing these days, I hear.

2/2

Show threadPYM le pirate capoeiristeFeb 13, 2025
@darkling @cstross 😱