![]() ![]() ![]() Because TimeMachine drives can fail (TM is very hard on hard drives), I also use Chronosync to mirror the Dropbox folder onto my Drobo drive, which has four redundant 1TB drives. This will also mean that my Dropbox is backed up hourly by TimeMachine. I put my local Dropbox folder in my WebDAV folder allowing me alternate access to those files if Dropbox goes down. To make sure I don't lose any more revisions, I have taken the following precautions. She doesn't understand me most of the time, but she loves me. Yes, I have my own unix WebDAV server running on my four year old Mac mini. I won't return to Pages because it has a lot of fancy overhead for marking up text that I don't need, and although it supports reading and writing from WebDAV folders, it's an awkward process. Both have word counts and basic features for writing on the go without interruption. So now I'm saying "sayonara" to MyWritingNook and embracing other apps that utilize Dropbox. I could have restored an earlier version from a backup. This whole mess could have been reverted if MyWritingNook allowed me to backup my files locally. So now I've decided that the cloud isn't so nifty. The app even made sure I was sure by asking me to confirm the change. I compared and recompared, and read and reread. Too bad it replaced the version I wanted to keep with the version I wanted to delete. I was given a choice to compare versions within the app and choose which one I wanted to keep. I tried it out yesterday when I was alerted that for some reason a chapter of #snkrz was out of sync. Then MyWritingNook fixed their syncing system they made the syncing smarter. Instead of chucking the iPad for a pen & paper notebook, I did the dance. Then I could force the clients to sync to get the official version. It usually meant I had to compare each version manually, pick the best one, do a rain dance, then delete the wrong one from the other clients one at a time. ![]() MyWritingNook used to make me jump through hoops to sync the most recent version to all the other clients. When this happens, it usually means you have updated a document in two different places. The problem with cloud clients, however, is that sometimes they get out of sync with the mothership if they use local copies to work from. Dropbox is a popular cloud storage service, for example. This allows you access from any computer or mobile device that can run their client. For you non-geeks out there, cloud services are basically web sites that offer to hold your data for you. Over the past six months, more and more writing apps have been released for the iPad and now I have my pick of many excellent choices, but they all seem to have one major problem: they live in the cloud. All documents synced to a Google server and I could access them from a web browser on my Mac. Then MyWritingNook came out for the iPad and I was a happyish camper. I stuck with Apple's Pages and ended up emailing myself any documents I wrote (or copying and pasting with Pastebot). This could sync to my Mac mini (which could become my new writing station), but it looked horrible on the iPad. WriteRoom, the unfancy text editor for the Mac, had an iPhone version. I was determined to make my new writing system work, however. Jailbreaking the iPad wasn't an option for me. I could only run apps available in the appstore. Unlike the Mac, or Linux or Windows for that matter, the iPad had a closed ecosystem. Even when I discovered Scrivener and started altering my workflow, everything fit seamlessly into my backup system. ![]() It also whistled Dixie and polished my shoes. I even wrote an Applescript that would automagically recognize the USB drive when it was inserted, then update the disk image copy and auto-unmount the drive. On the Mac I used CopyWrite to write my novel, DEVONthink to gather all my notes and data, and then saved all the data onto an encrypted disk image that I regularly backed up onto a USB drive I carried around with me. When I switched over to writing my novel on the iPad (because my daughter rudely stole my sexy, matte-black MacBook ), I found myself adrift in a sea of useless note taking apps and Apple's word processor, Pages. Chapter Six disappeared after it was shaping up so nicely. That's what happened to me the other day. Or misplacing ballots… I usually take severe precautions to keep my data intact, but it seems I am always a victim of the random data glitch. Losing gigabytes of family movies in a hard drive failure can do that to a person. My children laugh at my paranoia, but I am always worried about data loss. (What follows is a very self-indulgent blog post filled with a geeky stream of iPad and Mac app names. ![]()
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