Working creative in the cloud (and not wanting to die)

February 14th, 2010

Three times in my life computers have made me want to die. And every time it was because I didn’t backup my data…

The first time was on my Amiga 500. I knew I should have made a copies of the floppy disks I had all my animations on but I just didn’t. They just stopped working. I wanted to kill myself.

The next time my hard-drive on my windows machine died. I wanted to kill myself. I had lost three years of designs, texts and songs. The data was miraculously recovered. I promised myself to always backup my work.

But I didn’t. In 2007, my laptop hard drive died. I had lost all my songs, a book I was writing and a lot of design work. I had my first gig coming up in two weeks and as a laptop musician no files means no songs. It was depressing, I wanted to die.

You are exaggerating

When I write that I wanted to die, I really mean that I wanted to die. If you make something creative I think you understand me. Losing works feels like loosing children. For everyone else; yes I know it sounds a absurd, I know…

Since then I have actually been making backups. But I worked on different computers and made many backups so I made a mess.

I decided to find a good solution to just never loose a file, and always have the same versions of my files on all my computers. I decided to move my files to “the cloud”. And it’s the best thing I have ever done, data back up wise. I couldn’t have made my debut album without sorting out my files.

The two best solutions I found

Dropbox
Sync between computers and phones. Keeps your files safely backed up. You can easily go back to any version of a file for thirty days (if you pay for it which I do you can go back FOREVER). Take a look at Dropbox.

Evernote
Collects your notes. A note can be text or images and you can tag the notes so you easily can search and find them. It even indexes the text inside of a image. Really useful if you have a lot of ideas. Take a look at Evernote.

The thing with both of these services are: THEY WILL KEEP YOUR DATA SAFE FOREVER. (Forever as in a very long time at least) And you will be able to concentrate on the fun parts of working creatively and sleep a bit better at night.

And hopefully go through life not wanting to die.