Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Tools for Writers (and anyone else who works from home).

Lying in bed one night, thinking about what I’d do if my computer corner were destroyed by flood, fire or plague of electronics-eating locusts—is it just me whose imagination tends to the paranoid?—I found myself making a shopping list of the things I’d have to replace as soon as the desk, chair and computer were back in situ.
And I realized it’s actually quite a useful shopping list for any writer—or anyone who works from home. So I’m sharing it, together with the offer to join in my late-night paranoia.

First, the program that means I can imagine the destruction of my computer without breaking into a cold sweat. Carbonite. Backing-up for the careless, the lazy and the forgetful.
Carbonite is a program no writer should be without. For an annual fee of $54.95, you can install it on your computer and it will run unobtrusively in the background, constantly backing up your files onto a remote server. If you have a hard-drive crash (or a burglary) and lose everything, you can simply restore all your files back onto your new computer. Carbonite also keeps deleted files for a period of about a month, so if you accidentally delete your manuscript it’s okay—you can go and grab it off the remote server, and within a few minutes you’ll have it all safe on your hard drive again.

Second, Dropbox. This can work as another backup (remember, we’re in paranoid land here—we’re not happy with just one backup!), but it’s more useful in another way.
Dropbox is a “cloud computing” program—basically it’s a remote server that your computer “sees” as a folder in “My Documents”, so you can move or copy files, or save work directly, into it.
The folder on your computer then automatically synchronizes with the remote server to make further copies of all your files, so you now have a folder on your computer and an exact mirror-copy at the Dropbox site. If you accidentally delete a file, you can restore it from the Dropbox site. If you accidentally save over a file (which is much worse, take it from someone who once saved a blank document over an entire 130k manuscript) you can get the original back by choosing to restore an earlier version of that file.
As well as accessing your work from the Dropbox website, you can choose to sync it with other computers. I have all my work files in a Dropbox folder which syncs between my desktop, my Dropbox account, and my laptop. It’s the best thing ever—it means I can seamlessly transfer working from the desktop to the laptop and vice versa without fiddling around making sure I’ve got all the files I need.
As a nice extra point, Carbonite recognizes the files in My Dropbox folder, so not only are they saved across three different machines, they’re also auto-backed-up on Carbonite.

Third, virus protection. And no, I’m not patronizing you by telling you you need that on your computer! I’m talking about the invisible yuckies lingering on your keyboard. Just looking down at my keyboard now, I can see dust, fluff, greasy fingerprints and mysterious drip-marks. I know there’ll be invisible dead skin cells on there, and bacteria, and viruses. Which is when I grab my squishy, gooey pot of Cyberclean. This is like a blob of fluorescent Playdough that you squidge over your keyboard and mouse (and phone), picking up dust and fluff and killing germs as it goes. As well as being useful, it’s kind of fun.

Fourth, as all home-workers know, it’s horribly easy to look after the computer more than you look after yourself. RSI and writer’s bottom, anyone? Here, I find an exercise DVD really useful. The one I have is divided so that you can do the whole hour’s workout, or you can do just the warm-up, cool-down and twenty minutes of proper exercise in the middle, taking just half an hour out of your working day. Of course I can spare an hour, but with the competing demands of work, writing, children’s home time and housework (where does all that cat hair come from?) it often feels as if I can’t. Whereas I can always (note to self: really, always) fit half an hour in somewhere.
I’ve also just changed over to a vertical mouse, designed to keep your hand and arm in a natural position and to reduce the symptoms of RSI—or stop them appearing in the first place. I use both that and a pen and tablet, with a mini keyboard so my mouse hand doesn’t have to stretch so far.

So, that’s me. What are your must-replace writing and work items?

Shopping-list links and details:
Carbonite ($54.95 for a year)
Dropbox (2GB is free (and it’s plenty, honest), a further 50GB is $99.00 a year)
Cyberclean ($7.99 plus p&p)
Evoluent Vertical Mouse ($80 for a wired right-hand-use mouse, more for left-hand and wireless)
Exercise DVDs

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