Thursday, August 4, 2011

Nuts! And bolts...

A quick post - the man and I are taking the girl to Sun Camp or as we're calling it - Cloud Camp. Hope she likes trudging around in the mud...
I wanted to do a technical update and see how you all manage it. Here's the thing - I recently bought a little laptop - think they call them netbooks - so I could take something LIGHT back and forth to work and continue my revising etc... Very happy with it - it was cheap and just the ticket. BUT...I didn't want to spend more for writing program than I did for the thing itself, so I loaded up open office. Easy peasy and free. I would like to get into it on this computer too but haven't quite managed the switch.
What this means is that I load up my updated manuscript on to the flash drive, then load it on to the netbook. Then I have to save it into open office after a big fight with the microsoft program that came with it (a cheezy effort to keep me shelling out the dough that I'm resisting). I also save the manuscript each time I work on it, on my external hard-drive. GAAAAAAH! Each time I save it to that, I must remember to save it AGAIN to the main computer or everytime I hit the little save button it is just updating my Lacie (external hard drive). Are you all following or are you nodding off to sleep?
This makes me feel safe. Also, I occasionally email it to Gwen - the whole document - then it is in cyberspace which is safe as houses.
All of this is making me a little twitchy and I wonder how you all keep track of your documents?

6 comments:

L. Diane Wolfe said...

Once I start entering my manuscript into my desktop computer (as I hand write first) I save it there in Word constantly, every new paragraph. Once a week I back it all up on an external hard drive and every couple weeks on a thumb drive I carry with me everywhere. I don't think I could go back and forth between two computers though.

Carol Kilgore said...

I manually save a lot when I'm working. At the end of each writing day, I email each document I've worked on to an online email account - like Yahoo Mail or gmail. I save each completed version of my manuscripts on a flash drive. I was saving to the flash every day, too, but finally decided to trust the online save.

Elspeth Futcher said...

I email it to myself in 5,000 word chunks from one email account to another - that way it sits in 'sent' in one and 'arrived' in the other.

Dorte H said...

Ah, now it suddenly dawned on me who my visitor "labanan" is!

How I keep track? I have *one* laptop, and I am the sole owner of same laptop. I have tried moving manuscripts about from stationary to laptop, but with the concentration problems I have these days I´d screw up big time at least once a week.

And I save copies of my manuscripts in two places at least a couple of times a month.

Mary@GigglesandGuns said...

I trust Word (stop laughing).
I save to the laptop while I'm working. At the end of a session it also goes to a flash drive; once a week to an external along with an email.
If it's lost with all of that I've got to believe it was never meant to be :/
I started this Christmas 2009 when I woke and all that was on my laptop was the ASUS logo. Anything Microsoft left with Santa I guess.

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