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