“Did I Save That?”
After a few choice profanities and laying into the person behind the tripped circuit, you come to the realization… “Did I save that?” Even reading that, my heart skips a beat! Saving and backing up a show is second-nature for seasoned programmers. But from time to time, stuff happens, and you can lose a desk or a show file anyway. You can feel your heart racing as you scramble to recover the work, and pray that you saved the show. There is always the backup, right?
There are numerous ways to automatically save a show file, depending on your desk. Some allow for saving upon recording of a cue, some automatically save after a certain amount of time. Then there is my personal favorite — recording a save macro. This is the first line of defense in saving a show. But what if something happens to the desk? Do you have a backup somewhere?
Backing up a show file is just as important as saving the show to the desk. And just like saving a show, saving a backup is easy — and much easier than re-doing all your work. Once again, using my favorite method, a macro, you can save to the show to the desk as well as saving it to a thumb drive.
Backing up a show file to an external drive is not only a safe bet, but a smart one. Memory sticks are cheap these days. You can pick up a 4GB thumb drive for less then $10 at any electronics store. I also dedicate a jump drive for each type of console I run. I have amassed a nice collection of thumb drives. But there’s a downside: Because thumb drives are so small, they are easy to misplace or forget in the back of a desk. (I have fallen victim to that on several occasions.)
Backing Up Online
To ensure that I still have my show files available to me anytime I need them, I back them up online. Not just once, but twice and sometimes three times. If I am out on the road, getting a show file off the cloud is easy. All I need is an Internet connection.
After saving the show file to the desk and a backup to a thumb drive, a copy of that nights’ show file goes on to my Dropbox folder (dropbox.com). The beauty of saving it to Dropbox is that it is on my computer’s hard drive, the drive in the cloud and any other device that I have connected to my Dropbox account. In a pinch, if I don’t have my computer, I can log into my Dropbox account through a Web browser and download it from there.
To make sure my show files are even more secure and available, I email them to myself. I file the email away in my inbox that also lives on both my computer and on my mail server somewhere in the cloud. Once again, I can log into my mail server from any computer and retrieve my show file.
Safe, Not Sorry
All of this backing up and remote file storage sounds like overkill. But I would rather be safe then sorry. At any time, one or multiple backup methods could fail. My main show file thumb drive could crap out and not work, or I might not have Internet available where I am. But since I am covered by at least four backups, I am a bit less worried.
