what do you use to backup your work?

zankoo

zankoo

Really Experienced
CHYOA Backer
I've always wanted to keep backup copies of everything I've done here. Google Docs is fine, but not easy to organize in terms of threads and stuff. I tried Twine, which seemed like a great app for creating a CYOA structure ... except then Twine somehow managed to obliterate my latest efforts, reverting a 900-chapter file to a 2-years-ago 250-chapter version, with no apparent recovery option available.

So ... what do you use? Do you have a good system for backing up your work?
 
I write on word docs and keep them on my laptop, every so often I back up my lap top to an external hard drive. To be fair when I started doing this it was because I find it easier to write on word than directly onto CHYOA. And I can use Grammarly on a word doc. The fact that it means all my work is backed up off site was a happy coincidence for me. I find it very helpful to back up the pics I use on my laptop too, with hosting sites changing their rules on use of porn so frequently it was a lesson I learned the hard way.

I only write linear stories though so I'm not sure if word would work so well for branching stories and game mode.
 
I've just been using Google Docs for writing, and haven't really been too concerned about backing up so far. Have things been lost from CHYOA?

I wonder if a wiki of some sort might work for maintaining the branching structure?
 
MisterMan1965 said:
Have things been lost from CHYOA?
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If you upload something by accident that's not allowed on the site, it'll get deleted. If you upload something that is allowed, but the rules change and it becomes disallowed, it'll get deleted. If CHYOA goes belly-up entirely (every site does, eventually!), it'll get deleted.

Never rely exclusively on someone else's infrastructure to preserve your work.
 
It has never come to my mind to backup the writing from here.


I guess it is partially that I don't consider these works so important, and partially that since my threads are spread out far and wide, I would not know how to organise them.
 
zankoo said:
I've always wanted to keep backup copies of everything I've done here. Google Docs is fine, but not easy to organize in terms of threads and stuff. I tried Twine, which seemed like a great app for creating a CYOA structure ... except then Twine somehow managed to obliterate my latest efforts, reverting a 900-chapter file to a 2-years-ago 250-chapter version, with no apparent recovery option available.

So ... what do you use? Do you have a good system for backing up your work?
Click to expand...
It depends on how detailed you wanted to get. I keep the written stories in Word Docs on OneDrive (MS equivalent to Google Docs/Drive). When I want to keep track of forking and trees, I put hyperlinks at the end of the chapter to list the options to the files that have the chapters. Its not highly dynamic or easy to manage, but its enough for free content I post for fun to keep the content and intent if I really had to restore something.

If I were going to do this for profit, I would have each chapter stored as its own file and have a replica of the map. That replica could either be a doc/onenote/html/json file with a tree list and links to each file with each choice, but this just isn't worth the time/effort for me.
 
I highly recommend multiple backups. Only recently I realized most of my files were saved only on Google docs, and several people were reporting their accounts were banned for having NSFW content, even when it wasn't publicly shared. I searched through and found an easy "download everything" button so now it's also saved on my computer. Laptops get stolen, thumb drives get lost, and online backups get deleted. Best to always have at least two (but ideally three) forms of backups.
 
remysloane said:
There are other threads on this from a year or two ago. I know I was exploring various tools to backup the story from the website, so my backup would keep the chapter structure as a tree with separate pages like they are on the site. I couldn't find a way to do it and don't recall anyone else reporting success.
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I'm a little surprised to hear that, because it looks at first glance like a personal web crawl of a story or just the story map page would work.
 
Most of my stories are in Scrivener with redundant cloud and external harddrive backups. And I use Aeon Timeline for branch and rules management.
 
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