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?

Office 2007 SP2 will be here early in… 2009. Uh, okay. Good stuff, though.

To be fair, this is not the first time we have talked about SP2. Sev­eral months ago, we announced that we’ll be fur­ther demon­strat­ing our increased com­mit­ment to inter­op­er­abil­ity by includ­ing sup­port for Open Doc­u­ment For­mat (ODF), XML Paper Spec­i­fi­ca­tion (XPS), and Portable Doc­u­ment For­mat (PDF) in SP2. In addi­tion to those file for­mat addi­tions, some other high­lights that you’ll find in SP2 include:

For Office Desk­top Programs:

• Improved Out­look Cal­en­dar­ing Reliability
• Improved Out­look Performance
• Enabling Object Model sup­port for Charts in Pow­er­Point and Word
• Improved cryp­to­graphic func­tion­al­ity by sup­port­ing all cryp­to­graphic algo­rithms offered by the oper­at­ing system
• Improved func­tion­al­ity in Excel’s chart­ing mechanism
• Abil­ity to ungroup Smar­tArt graph­ics (and as a result, the abil­ity to add ani­ma­tions to them in PowerPoint)
• Abil­ity for Visio to export UML mod­els to an XML file com­pli­ant with the XMI standard
• Tool that enables the unin­stall of Office client Ser­vice Packs

Now that I’m using a net­book as my pri­mary com­puter, I’m really look­ing for­ward to the improved Out­look per­for­mance. Yay!