For digital documents you want to keep for a long time, I suggest the Three P’s:
- Plain text
- PDFs
- Printouts
While in college in the mid 1990’s, and prior to purchasing my first computer, I utilized a word processor. Think manual typewriter but with a 3.5″ floppy disk for storage. I wish I had known enough to preserve all of my writings. The floppy disks were formatted for the word processor but not the computer. It wiped everything off the disk to make room for the Windows formatting. The lesson here is to preserve your work and prepare by future-proofing formats. It was a hard learned lesson. All of my personal writing, studies and papers gone.
I was reminded of all of this when I read about how Hemingway’s early notes and the beginning of a novel disappeared. His wife had gathered his works and left Paris by train to Switzerland to meet him and a publisher and somehow, the suitcase went missing from the train platform and they were devastated.
My loss was due to ignorance and in no way as significant as Hemingway’s loss. But the pain was there.
My revamped workflow process is:
- Write and edit drafts in Ulysses (saved to cloud, backed up onto my file server)
- Publish from Ulysses to my website (saved to cloud)
- Copy/Paste to my own database in plain text format (cloud, file server)
- Migrate all of my work into the database in plain text, organize.
- Print to .pdf by year (saved to cloud and file server)
- Print to paper by year (saved to a dedicated yearly file folder or binder)
Interesting enough, while walking through the library’s “read and return” section, the word “Hemingway” ended up in my peripheral vision.
Rabbits and Frequency Illusion!
I usually don’t give them a glance but the paper spine was attractive. The fiction novel title is “The Hemingway Thief” and how the aforementioned luggage was lost. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to be a good yarn with a few secrets and twists. Looking forward to reading it as soon as possible.
