good writing habits Archives - GoatKeepers Press

My friend, Dr. Richard Rintz, was hard at work on his book on Asclepias (milkweeds) when his screen went blank. The file vanished and was never found. He discovered then the wisdom of backing up files.

Many programs periodically save documents automatically. It’s so easy to forget to save your work as you go. It’s so easy to lose your work.

Having a Plan

I generally have a flash key open as I work. Every so often my work gets saved to the flash key giving me a copy on my hard drive and on the flash key.

At least, that is the plan. In practice one copy or the other is the one most up to date and the copy is not done often enough. It’s so easy to let backing up files slide.

One of my biggest liabilities is the accumulation of plant pictures taken over the year. This year’s file is over 18 GB. None of it was backed up until this month.

I’d seen this Common Hops vine before, even had a few pictures of it. This year I came across this year’s vine as it started to bloom. The hardest part is finding the plant again to get pictures of the fruit or seed pods. I had to search a couple hundred feet of creek bank, but I found the vine and finished up the pictures this year.

Image File Woes

Picture taking of plants is done for the year. I have one tree bud picture to go and will get it this week. Now is the time I take for backing up files of these pictures because the files are complete for the year.

I tried backing up during the season one year. Disaster. I added to some files, not others and couldn’t remember which. It took hours to find which files needed to be redone and which didn’t.

This little plant makes a great ground cover. It blooms for months and self seeds. I’d seen the plant in town and down by the river. My files had lots of pictures of the flowers. Somehow, I never found the seed pods as the plants disappeared under larger plants. This year I completed my round of pictures and backing up files of them was very important.

So now I am taking a break from the novel and going over the plant pictures. It is slow as I must go over each plant, check which ones are in the Dent County Flora books, add the new ones, then back up the file.

Some new ones were added to the Flora books during the summer. There were so many plants, so many pictures and doing entries for iNaturalist (citizen science site). Some plants were unknown and later identified.

By the end of the year all of my files will be backed up. Then I can breathe a sigh of relief as backing up files means I shouldn’t lose them, only forget which flash key they are on.