GENREALITY

(I’ve got only a few days to finish up the final edits on the next Jeremiah Hunt novel, so I’m pulling one out of the vaults for this week. This post has previously appeared at RockYourWritingCareer.com, but I think some of you might find it useful as well.)

When I’m writing I often split my time between working at home on my desktop and working somewhere else (often the library or the local coffee shop) on my laptop. As you can guess, this use to create a issue with keeping the various versions of the manuscript straight and up-to-date. At first, I would email the files to myself and load them up on whatever machine I used next. When that became a bit of a hassle, I tried keeping one single master file on a thumb drive and carrying that around with me wherever I went. That worked for a while, until I misplaced my thumb drive for three days and nearly went out of my mind.

Then I discovered Dropbox and I’ve been using it ever since.

To get started, all you have to do is visit the Dropbox site and create a free account. Through this account you can manage your Dropbox service – upload and download files, share files, create public and shared folders, and more. Once your account is set up you can download and install Dropbox on as many computers as you want to use, linking them to your account as you do so. The software will create a “My Dropbox” folder on each computer as part of the process.

That’s when the magic begins. Anything you put in that Dropbox folder will be instantly shared and available on your other computers.

So I can work on my latest novel on my laptop at the coffee shop, save the file to my Dropbox, and then open it up again later that night on desktop knowing that I don’t have to worry if this is the latest version or not. It has all been taken care of behind the scenes for me.

Dropbox also lets me access my files from a public computer as well, simply by logging in to the website.

When I save the file back to the website, it will automatically update the version in the My Dropbox folder on my computer’s hard drive the next time I fire it up.

Another very cool feature of Dropbox is the service’s ability to save your revision history. If you delete a file, or decide that an earlier version is more acceptable to your needs, you can go into the Revision section and restore it.

Dropbox will also let you create public and shared folders, so that you can collaborate on a project, and it even has a photo sharing utility if you want to go that route as well.

Basic accounts are free and provide 2 gigs of space. You can also get premium paid plans that offer up to 100 gigs of storage a year. Either way, I wouldn’t do without it at this point.

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