Part 1: Tips for Looking after Digital creations from writing to artwork and everything in between. . .

Sharing part 1 of a two-part series on looking after your hard work and effort.  Part two will be posted to my facebook page tomorrow.

Part 1: Tips for Looking after Digital creations from writing to ar...

Whether you are a photographer, videographer, writer, graphics artist, or a pencil-pusher with spreadsheets and emails all over the place, the last thing you want to do is lose hours, perhaps even dollars invested in your intellectual property!

As both a computer tech and a creative in various disciplines all using words, let me offer some suggestions to ensure wasted hours and money don't visit you!

Recommendation number ONE: Save your work often! As I taught a group of Rwandan elementary school teachers a few years ago, “Save as you go!” Every few minutes, hit the save button in the program you are using. You never know when the power might go out, when your computer might freeze up forcing you to reboot, or worse, your computer crashing altogether or being zapped by a thunderstorm moving through the area. If you are saving every few minutes and something happens to interrupt your work, you won't have as much to redo.

DO NOT rely on various programs that claim to have a file recovery feature. While Microsoft Word and OpenOffice offer this as a feature, this feature is only as good as how often the auto-save feature is set to operate, or how often you yourself have hit the save button. Don't expect this feature to salvage everything you were working on.

Recommendation number TWO: When you make a major change to a file to allow for a variation on it's original purpose, save the change with a different file name. A picture for example that has words for the days of the week, should have 7 different file names, one for each day of the week. This goes for editing documents as well. Each major revision should have it's own file name, “filename1.doc, filename2.doc, filename3.doc, etc”. In this manner, if a revision gets corrupted for any reason, you can go back to a previous revision and carry on from there.

Recommendation number THREE: Back up your data!!! Create an account for yourself at mozyhome.com ($6.mo/50gb), sugarsync (free unless you want more space) or a similar service. Set up the service to back up your files twice a day. In this way changes you make late at night get backed up in the morning, while changes made during the day get backed up in the evening. If you make an irrecoverable error to a file, you can restore it immediately.