Blaming my tools

I was going to talk about my new sooper seekrit plan to release and mar­ket Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles today, but I expe­ri­enced some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties recently that I just have to rant about. We’ll get to the busi­ness plan stuff, I promise. Eventually.

But first, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

For quite some time now, my writ­ing sys­tem has been rel­a­tively sim­ple and has served me well. I have a note­book in Ever­note for each of my major projects. In each, I have var­i­ous sup­port mate­ri­als along with a note for the man­u­script itself. In this note, I have the out­line for the book in plain text and a .docx file attach­ment for the man­u­script. When it comes time to edit, I open the note, dou­ble click on the attach­ment and edit the doc­u­ment. Ever­note is smart enough to update the note/​attachment every time the file I’m work­ing on is saved (it’s in a temp folder on my hard drive, but that doesn’t usu­ally mat­ter). I also keep my progress spread­sheets in sim­i­lar notes and work on them in a sim­i­lar way.

Until yes­ter­day, this sys­tem worked flaw­lessly. I have Ever­note on every PC I use: my work desk­top and lap­top, my per­sonal net­book, my iPhone. It all works great. Right up until it doesn’t.

A while back, I upgraded my net­book to use the new Ever­note 3.5 beta. Keep in mind, here, that I used to be a pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­oper. I would never trust my writ­ing to some­thing in the alpha stage of devel­op­ment, but a beta is sup­posed to be rel­a­tively sta­ble, just not fea­ture com­plete (see the Win­dows 7 beta as an exam­ple). Ever­note has made it clear that they will not be sup­port­ing 3.1 very long after 3.5 is offi­cially released, so I fig­ured I may as well start get­ting used to it. So I installed 3.5 Beta 4(!) and set about my work.

Yes­ter­day, the unthink­able hap­pened. Some­how, as I was open­ing the note con­tain­ing my man­u­script, the attach­ment for my man­u­script com­pletely dis­ap­peared! I wasn’t able to undo, and the desk­top synced the change back to the server, so I wasn’t able to pull the attach­ment from any of my other Ever­note clients. It was just gone. Noth­ing in the trash in Ever­note, just gone. 57,000 words of fic­tion, nearly 60 hours of work.

I scoured my hard drive look­ing for a backup or copy of the file. In the third place I looked, I found some­thing that looked promis­ing, and was able to get the file back. If that hadn’t worked, I would have been forced to recon­struct it from emails sent each day to my beta readers.

Psst, pro­gram­mers. Yeah, you. C’mere. You NEVER, EVER screw with the user’s data! A friend of mine pointed out that I was using beta soft­ware, but ANY bug that can irre­triev­ably destroy a user’s data should never have made it past alpha stage! I’ll accept a beta pro­gram crash­ing, but I will NEVER be okay with it trash­ing my data!

/​whacks Dave Eng­berg in the head

So I decided to take my data else­where. If I can’t trust Ever­note to never, ever lose my data, I can’t trust it at all. What else is out there?

A lot of peo­ple rec­om­mend Drop­box. So if fig­ured, sure, I’ll give it a go. I installed it on my net­book, and hey, so far, so good. The UI is clean and effi­cient, and it doesn’t seem to kill my Via CPU net­book (it pre­dates the Atom, we’re talk­ing stone age net­book). Doc­u­ments saved to fold­ers inside the “drop­box” folder on my desk­top are auto­mat­i­cally synced both to the cloud and any other PCs I have linked to my Drop­box account. Feels a lot like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, only about a kajil­lion times faster.

And it worked great until I got to work this morn­ing and tried to install it on my office PC. Ever­note works fine over my cor­po­rate proxy server. It uses the same proxy set­tings as Inter­net Explorer, set up in the Con­trol Panel, so it never even asked. It just worked. And while Drop­box claims to do the same, it doesn’t work. Nor does it work if I man­u­ally set up the proxy set­tings in Drop­box itself, which it does allow for (Seesmic for Win­dows doesn’t, which is why I can’t use it at the office). No mat­ter what I do, I can’t get Drop­box to con­nect to the cloud through our cor­po­rate net­work gob­lins. Stu­pid goblins.

So that’s two highly regarded file sync solu­tions blown out of the water by my par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. I don’t trust Ever­note any­more — even after down­grad­ing it back to 3.1, because I know I can’t keep 3.1 indef­i­nitely — and I can’t use Drop­box on the PC where I spend half my wak­ing hours. So what’s left?

Sadly, the only thing that comes to mind is good old Sneak­er­net. I have a 2GB thumb­drive on my key­chain, and for now, I’m just going to put every­thing on there, and peri­od­i­cally use Microsoft’s Sync­Toy to back it up to the Drop­box folder on my net­book. That way I can access my files on any PC — well, any PC that uses Microsoft Office 2007, because I’m not giv­ing up Word; I’ve tried Google Docs and found it lack­ing — and as long as I remem­ber to run Sync­Toy every so often, they’ll get backed up to both my net­book hard drive and the cloud. It’s an inel­e­gant solu­tion, because it relies on my markedly unde­pend­able wet­ware to remem­ber to back it up, but that’s all I’ve got. Every other solu­tion I know of doesn’t meet my require­ments: sup­port my cor­po­rate net­work, run on both the iPhone and Win­dows, and be safe and dependable.

How do you store your work­ing manuscripts?