Screenwriting : Those Dang Gremlins - a cat owning screenwriter's rant by Elle Bolan

Elle Bolan Cats really do have a talent for finding the worst possible moment to walk across a keyboard! I've been burned by a save-over-the-wrong-file moment myself, so now I'm strict about cloud backups plus versioned file names (draft_v1, draft_v2, etc.) so I can always roll back a step. Glad your backups saved most of it the "kitty stomp typing" edits sound like a fun bonus round of editing though

It took just one time of overwriting to teach me that lesson too.

The cat issue will never change haha. Life with pets, right??

Elle Bolan Terrorists… and saboteurs…

Yikes Elle Bolan - I'm so sorry. You love those animals but sometimes....

I have a service called "pCloud". Works beautifully. Every time I have a new draft, it's saved on my computer and on pCloud. I used to use a thumb drive as well but that got cumbersome. The cloud has worked great.

"The criminals you see pictured here." Haha I make a backup copy of my script, @Elle. I also email both of them to myself. I have a USB cable that connects to my laptop and phone, but I think I need a new one because the cable acts up sometimes. I've been thinking about getting a thumb drive again too.

Doesn't this post belong in Your Stage?

AJ Richards - what makes it appropriate for the screenwriting lounge is the question posed that everyone can benefit from. Elle asks, "So, screenwriters, how do you handle a draft mishap?Do you have backups on backups? Do you store in the cloud? Do you still use storage devices like an external hard drive or thumb drive? Do you go old school and email it to yourself?"

These are questions that all can benefit from. Elle Bolan is also an experienced moderator who knows how to navigate the site well. Thanks so much for asking AJ - it helps us all gauge what is appropriate for the screenwriting lounge.

Helping writers. Like this that feels more helpful that was sent to Your Stage: https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/Writers-What-features-would...

Hi AJ. Just to clear things up, the Your Stage lounge is actually specifically for promotional material. This post wouldn't fit there at all.

I brought the question up here after losing a couple pages of edits because other than cloud backup, I don't know of anything on PC that autosaves multiple draft files. Other screenwriters might. That's why I asked here. And other screenwriters still might benefit from the answers. Such as Leo's pcloud. I'd never heard of it and am seriously considering using it due to his suggestion.

An argument could definitely be made that this post fits as well in the Anything Goes lounge, so I'm not even defending why I posted it here. It absolutely could fit in Anything Goes. But I posed the question here for the opinions of other writers and how they back up their material. We've all lost work one way or another.

But it definitely could fit in either lounge and just because I'm a mod doesn't mean I can't be wrong. I might be. If I am, my fellow mods will let me know, or our head of community will.

I appreciate the accountability check though, and I truly mean that. I want our community to feel like they can always ask me clarifying questions on my posts. I'm not perfect by any means.

Hope this clears things up.

Back up on multiple hard drives. Regularly. The cloud exposes your IP to anyone who can hack. Clouds have crashed in the past.. Keep one of those hard drives in a different location in case the acts of God, antics of cats thing goes berserk.

My gawd, TL:DR. Not even about the post.

More a commentary about the randomness and the arbitrary shuffling of posts that's afoot recently. Maybe it comes down to hierarchy. Is this poster a WR member ... if not then a second class citizen. Maybe overall a more even strain is in order. There's no anarchy to wrangle here.

Given the two, still take the banished post, and thanks to this poor guy relegated to the cheap seats who's attempting to directly help writers with no cats and a topic that's been beaten to death: https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/Writers-What-features-would...

Hope that clears things up.

OMG!! Have two of the same kind. But British Shorthair. Their covering of my laptop comes with a double, super thick coat...Hope you got your work back!

Elle, I'm a proud user of thumb drives...and I try my best to do a backup every time I finish a page.

Export a pdf every day. Use Dropbox in case your computer falls in a lake.

Final Draft's auto backup every 15 minutes :)

Could be worse. One story about the famous Lars von Trier is that when he was young, he wrote a screenplay together with another man. They made no printouts to save money. And no security copies. The computer broke down shortly before it was time to make the first printout. So everything was lost.

When I edit, I make printout the same day. And securlty copies.

Not only FD auto save, Rodney, but who walks away from work without first saving manually. In this "feline situation," one could just delete the spurious text. That has nothing to do with maintaining backups.

Above all, you are most fortunate to have criminals!

AJ, it's almost like not everyone uses Final Draft.

I'm looking for methods I don't currently use because this situation brought up a gap in my own backup system. Other writers may find those methods useful as well. That's the discussion I intended to have here.

As you've made it clear that your larger concern is with how posts are being moved or categorized across the Lounges in previous comments, that's something you can take directly to Ashley Smith, our Head of Community, at community@stage32.com. I'd suggest including links to the posts you're concerned about and screenshots so she has the context she needs to look into it. She can handle it from there.

Again, appreciate the accountability check.

All screenwriting software has an auto save function which, again, is in place while working a draft and is separate from maintaining continuity over drafts by copying them to secondary devices or other secure places when done with sessions.

Thanks for the appreciation.

Okay, then if you have intimate knowledge of all screenwriting software AJ, maybe you can help me. Because this situation was something I haven't experienced when I use Fade In Pro.

This project in particular was being worked on in Arc Studio. It saves as a live draft and stores in a cloud as far as I know. Every keystroke saves live to my knowledge. And from what I've been able to find, I can't seem to recall a previous draft in that software.

I tend to export a PDF periodically when I'm using Arc Studio, but I don't export every few minutes. I went to the kitchen for coffee and came back to kitty WWE and a couple messed up pages.

Again, it saves like a live document. I loved that feature at first, but in this case... Not so much. It only cost me time and correction, yeah, but I would have loved to have a backup from 5 minutes previous.

Are you familiar with that software? If so, do you know something I don't? Because even Google says yes, Arc Studio saves live and automatically backs up the live doc.

This info is available in the users guide or in a Google.

Unlike FD, the gold standard, auto save is configurable between 3 and 60 minutes. Fade in is 2 to 60. Auto save in Arc is hardcoded to 10 minutes - not very user friendly.

Yes, that hardcoded 10 minute booger got me this time.

Thanks AJ. That was helpful. I'll be digging into Arc's options further to see how best to use a workaround to their cloud backup.

One of the various unfortunate cons that come as a package deal with these damn felines. You're right, they're lucky they're cute!