24 3 Mechanics of Writing
- Frequently save the document you are working on. Most editors have a feature
for automatically saving to disk every few minutes. This copies your file to what-
ever working storage you are using—local hard disc on your desktop, your area
on a departmental file server, or a home server. In addition, I strongly recom-
mend that you copy your work to some other backup storage every hour or two. - Backup storage technology for home computers continues to change; I’ve used
cassettes—yes, home audio cassettes were once a storage medium for personal
computers—four different kinds of floppy disk, four different kinds of digital
tape, CD-ROM, DVD, external hard drives, and at the moment, mostly, USB
flash memory. These are all examples of non-volatile storage, that is, the data
isn’t lost when the power goes off. USB flash drives seem to be particularly ro-
bust, and at (in 2011) a few dollars per gigabyte, a student can easily buy several
and use them in rotation. Leave a USB drive plugged into your computer, and
drag your files onto it every now and again.^4 Make sure it always has the most
recent or ‘master’ version—then you can use the drive for carrying the softcopy
of your thesis around. Also consider backing up onto file servers at your institu-
tion, and be aware that there are internet services that provide file storage. None
of these is absolutely reliable; so why not use all of them? - Print out your thesis every now and again—the whole thing every 3 or 6 months,
or a chapter when it is (temporarily) finished with. This also gives you a hard-
copy to scribble on. - Create explicit versions. When you save your document to disk, you automati-
cally delete the earlier version of it by overwriting with the new version. (Some
software is slightly more flexible, and automatically keeps both ‘current’ and
‘previous’, but earlier versions are still lost.) For example, if you are reorganiz-
ing the structure of a document called ‘Ch 08 Discussion’ and have saved once
or twice, then decide you don’t like the new version after all, you will have lost
the original. Therefore, if you have any doubts as to whether you might want to
keep the earlier version, make a copy of it and call it ‘Ch 8 Discussion backup
2011-03-19’ before you start editing. - Create whole directories with complete versions of the thesis. Include the date
of the version in the directory name—thesis-2009-03-19 is unambiguously from
March 19 2009. A typical thesis is a few megabytes; in 2010 a hundred mega-
bytes of disk costs less than one cent. You can afford to create a version as often
as every day. Back these up, too. - Use logical names for the thesis components. A student of mine, Jim, gradually
got into difficulties because his naming scheme broke down. He kept every ver-
sion, but they would have names such as ‘results-off’, ‘results-no-refs’, ‘results-
keep’, and ‘results-valsNotChecked’. He was adding results he thought were
interesting, but not to be used in the final thesis, to results he wanted to keep.
While ‘results-off’ had been used for official runs (that is, data he was happy
(^4) However, it is not a good idea to open up the files while they are on the USB drive—instead,
first copy them to your hard disk. Currently (2014), the USB drives can burn out if they are being
accessed continuously. If used as backup only, though, even the cheap ones will last for years.