I'm not going to go into whether you have books on your desk or juggling balls, whether there's a blanket for your cat to nap on, or a small den of not-quite-pet spiders under the monitor. Though I'm sure we all drool over the possibility of our own dedicated writer's room, most of us have to make do with the same space that we use for bill-paying, web-surfing and possibly dinner-eating

Nor do I think it particularly matters whether you like to write your drafts out longhand and transcribe them. Personally, I loathe transcription, and taught myself a decade ago to work on a computer from idea to final draft - as a touch-typist, my typing is at least five times faster than my writing, and the ease of editing quickly sold me over the loss of "feel". (Just in case you're thinking of switching.) Mind you, if longhand drafts are good enough for Neil Gaiman, it's hard to argue against.

But there is something that writers seem to shy away from doing properly. Work backups. Oh, so humdrum. When you've lost 70% of a manuscript, you can tell me how humdrum it would be to have to back your work up. But it's really - really - not that hard, not that tedious, not that scary. For one thing, forget CDs, DVDs and external harddrives. No, really. That's not a backup. External harddrives are generally just as fragile as the original harddrive you're insuring, and the data medium on optical storage (that's CDs, DVDs and blueray) degrades over time and is easily scratched or damaged.

Backing up to a physical source means you have to care about one more thing, which is the exact opposite of what you want, here. You have to store that drive somewhere safe, somewhere that's not right next to the harddrive you just backed up (would you store the money you laid aside in case of robbery right next to the valuables that'll be stolen?) and make the effort to transport the data to and from that storage (burning a disc) and the storage to and from somewhere safe (safety deposit box, I guess).

Even if you manage that regularly - and I doubt many of us have the stomach to keep that up on a weekly basis for years - if your harddrive crashes, you have to get to the physical storage device. Go to the safety deposit box, or the fridge in your best friend's flat, or wherever you've secreted your work. That's fine if you've got nothing better to do with your afternoon, but if you're overseas and your laptop is stolen? At a conference, and you've lost your pendrive?

Online Backups

This is what I'm talking about. And it's really not scary at all. There are three main flavours of online backups, depending on your particular needs, technical expertise, and how you work. And I promise, there is an easy solution for those who feel proud about finding the power button on their computer!

Backup services

There's a whole swathe of them now - services that exist to store and backup your data. The one I use most often is DropBox, which stores 2Gig on a free account (more than enough for the average writer, upgradable if you're writing graphic novels or similar), accessable either by their web interface (download your files, work on them, upload them back) or - and this is what qualifies it for the "I can't turn my system on" award - a windows client that behaves exactly like a windows folder.

Seriously - it sits there with a little green arrow to tell you it's in sync, and then every change you make to any file in that folder is made in the files stored in the harddrive.

I use mine as my writing-and-general-projects folder - just save my work straight to the folder. It keeps time-stamped backups, so if I need to, I can go back to the version I had six weeks ago before I decided everyone had to wear pants for hats. If you want something super-easy that does backups for you, this is it - it even runs on your iPhone. You can also make folders public or sharable, and use it as an online repository for other people to download your data, if you want to.  (It's not publicly accessable by default, though.)

One caveat - it is not like Google Docs, in that you can't edit things online - you have to download, edit locally and reupload if you're not using the special client software. You can view Microsoft-format documents though (.doc, .xls, .ppt).

Google Docs

GoogleDocs is less of a back-up service, more of a work-anywhere service, but it rates a mention, here. While you don't get the nifty dropbox folder, or the timestamped records, you can work on your data anywhere that you have a web connection, right in-browser.

The formatting's not as easily powerful as regular office formats - it relies on HTML and CSS, which have a significant learning curve if you want the kind of formatting available with microsoft word (though the toolbar up the top of googledocs will fill the needs of 96% of writers). It's also online-only, which may be awkward if you're on the move or between wifi hotspots.

The online-editing also only works for office documents - .doc/odt, .xls, etc. You can't upload an indesign file and expect to be able to work on it through google docs (though you can upload any file to store there). But - if you mostly work in always-online areas and you tend to move about a fair bit (say, between the office and home), this might be for you - especially if one of those areas is somewhere you can't easily install the dropbox client, such as a work computer. (Hey, we've all worked on a story in our lunch hour, right?)

Personal Server

If neither of the out-of-the-box solutions works for you, because you need a few hundred gigs of storage, or you prefer to work across multiple documents, then a server might be more your style. A heads up that this requires a much higher level of technical know-how - if you don't understand how to set one of these up, then either learn, or use a different option. Not understanding how your own backup/work system works is like performing maintenance on a plane in mid-flight. You're going to break something, and it's not going to be pretty.

You have two options for a server: either get one hosted with a domain name (they're pretty cheap, these days) or host it yourself, if you have a permanent internet connection and a mostly-static IP address.  I'd recommend the former - it's not that much money, and hosting the server in your own house violates all the stuff I was blathering about up top - if the backup's in the same place as the work, it's not a backup.

With a personal server, you're free to set up whatever software you'd like - perhaps an SVN repository (timestamped savings) or a wiki (if you like working across multiple documents). You could even consider a software bug tracking system such as Trac - track "bugs" (required edits, notes to self, etc) in your stories, and commit changes to the text as you go.

It is more effort - most likely, you'll have to remember to manually commit your work back to the backup server, unless you work online (which again brings up the situation of always having to be online to see your work.) and maintaining security of your work will be on your own head. But it gives you much greater flexibility with your needs than the other two solutions.

Personally, I use all three flavours - testing out as I go. While I like DropBox, I work a lot on a system where I can't install the client. GoogleDocs works reasonably well for word-docs, but I can't use it for my novel (currently being written in yWriter). I'm currently investigating the best way to use the server that runs this site as a solution to both problems. So - try, and see what suits you best. But just remember - if it's sitting right next to you, it's not a backup.