Are You Prepared To Lose All Of Your Writing Work?

April 06, 2011

Things have been particularly busy for me lately and I’ve had to outsource some work to a few different people.

The writing wasn’t particularly complex and so I felt comfortable outsourcing it, as the process is generally straightforward — I explain what I need writing to the writer, I get the finishes pieces back a few days later, check through them, make any edits that are needed and then send them off to my client.

Although all of the work was delivered to a high standard, one writer I used had a few computer issues, most notably that they lost a few of the pieces — they thought they’d saved them, closed down the document and when they went to send the batch of work over to me, they were a few pieces short and couldn’t find them any where, resulting in them having to write more than they had anticipated.

When the writer was telling me this, I smiled to myself — admittedly rolling my eyes a little in the process — thought “I really need to tell them a bit more about saving files properly” and never thought anything about it (N.B. I’ve known the writer for a long time, know that they don’t have fantastic IT skills and I’ve been saying for a while that I’ll give them some computer lessons).

It wasn’t until I started thinking about my weekly blog post here that I realised just how big of a catastrophe this situation could actually be for a freelance writer if they’re not prepared.

I’m fortunate enough that I’ve got a natural interest in IT. I grew up around computers and for the last 10 years at least I’ve had some involvement with computers on a daily basis.

It’s because of this why I’ve developed a good knowledge of a range of different IT skills and utilize resources and processes such as proper file management and regular data backups to ensure that at worst, I’m only a day or two down on work that I’ve produced.

One of my favourite techniques to ensure that I never lose my work is to produce any piece of writing I do in a format where I can either set it up to save regularly or know that it’s going to be saved automatically every so often.

Where possible, I use a word processing document to do this, but I also regularly type into e-mails where they’re saved as a draft every 60 seconds and like I’m doing now, straight into a new blog post, as I know these are saved every few minutes, too.

I’m a huge believer in if you fail to prepare, you’re preparing to fail and when this is combined with a few near misses of losing documents, I now always ensure that I’ve got at least something to go back to and work from should technology fail on me.

In terms of your writing, what do you do to ensure that anything you produce isn’t at risk of being deleted before it’s used or sent to your client?