Saving your work is critically important. The last thing you want is for your computer to crash and to lose everything you've been working on. Or, for your notebooks to get destroyed and have been your only copy.
So what to do? How to keep your precious work safe? Here are 5 places you should save your manuscripts to!
1. An external hard drive.
Hard drives are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and able to store more and more data. For a 1 TB drive, you can pay close to $60. This is a steal, IMO, for a place to store nearly everything you could ever think of! A lot of people won't fill a terabyte of storage so this is an excellent device!
Most external hard drives connect via USB, making them very user friendly and plug-and-play. The drive I use is a WD My Passport that I purchased at Best Buy, which came with software so that you can set it so save certain files on a schedule (once a day at a certain time, for example). This is a great feature for those of us who are usually busy and forget! Also, you can simply drag and drop the files you want to save onto the drive yourself! I highly recommend an external drive.
2. Dropbox
Dropbox is a great place to store your manuscripts also. It's free, you just need to sign up for an account. The nice thing about Dropbox is it can be accessed anywhere, from almost any device. Not at home and want to work on your stuff? Just go to dropbox.com, login, and select what you want to work on!
3. Google Drive
Google Drive is the same as Dropbox. Create a free account or use your Gmail to get started. I like Google Drive because it crosses over well with all of the other Google applications. You can even create documents in Google Docs, and pretty much do all your writing online. Again, it's accessible anywhere you can sign on to the website!
4. A USB drive
If you don't want to spend the money on an external hard drive, a USB works just as well. Again, with technology advancing so quickly, USBs are growing in size and are able to store a lot more data than in the past. A 16G or 32G USB can be purchased at the store, usually for less than $20. I prefer not to use USBs as they are small and I lose them easily. If you keep track of your things well, then a USB may be the way to go!
5. The old-fashioned way: Email it to yourself!
This is the tried and true, and somewhat lazy (haha) way to do it! Just email the file to yourself or to multiple email addresses. The only downside to this is that you can only send relatively small files at a time. So if you have more than one, a larger storage device would be best. If you just want the extra security for one manuscript, then this is an easy way to do it!
Which places do you prefer to save your work to?