adminAs a Writer, one of the things we do little to no justice to is safeguarding our works and protecting them from getting lost.
Most often times than not, we find ourselves more concerned about protecting our works from being plagiarized coupled with fighting unauthorized use of our works which is good only if we could extend that much concern and energy to archiving and record keeping of our published, unpublished and submitted articles/write-ups/artworks.
As a Freelancer/Writer, most of the works we do are computer/online/phone-based and as much as it is easy to get carried away and involved in all of these writing and meeting deadline activities, our freelancing tools are electronic gadgets and technology at times could fail.
Last year, my first laptop became faulty. I love this laptop so much, not only because the colour was black but because of its sleekness. I gave the laptop to an Engineer and not only was he unable to rectify the problem; he couldn’t find my hard disk. I could vouch that I died many times thinking about the ugly incident months after. All my documents had gone and the most painful aspect of the whole story was the fact that I had lost a document of close to 200 pages I had been working on for 3 years. I had no backup elsewhere. . . like how did I make such a silly mistake? After I had gotten over the incident which took quite a while; of course, starting over was quite a nightmare for me, I promised myself I was going to maximize every document back-up apps that ever existed but not so much of a decision I stood by.
Few months ago, my current laptop wasn’t booting to Windows. It was only by chance that I had managed to recover some of my documents, I had so much that it was such a stress to recover all of them so yes, I had to close my eyes and my mind and let go while I was trying to choose the most important out of all the important documents. Then, I remembered my first experience and my resolve to guard against another occurrence. Now the point is, if I had maximized just one of my backup apps, I wouldn’t worry about getting my laptop wiped if need be.
In essence, what I have learnt going by these two experiences is that as Freelancers/Writers, we have to be intentional about safeguarding and record keeping of our documents. It’s not enough that we can recover them via email and that’s for the ones we did send to certain email accounts as attachments and can be recovered by downloading them on our phones but what about the ones we didn’t have to share via email, how do we manage to recover them? This brings me to the crux of this article which is maximizing the Dropbox App.
The Dropbox App is one of the easiest, easily accessed yet overlooked and idled document backup applications on every phone by most Freelancers. You can backup virtually anything on this app and access them whenever and wherever you choose to at no cost except data usage when it comes to accessing your cloud storage files (online files) and maximizing this will save a lot of emotional, physical and mental stress.
As a Freelancer who is making judicious use of his/her Dropbox App, you won’t have to go through the stress of crying over the loss of your documents, reconstructing and retyping of such documents when the energy can be put into creating another well-researched, mind blowing and thoughtful article/work of art.
Nonetheless, the key to the effective maximization of this app and many more as this that helps in safeguarding our works from unnecessary loss is being intentional about it. Just a moment of postponement could actually lead to long brooding over a document very dear to our heart. So when you are done with a document, send it that very minute to your Dropbox account, it doesn’t cost you anything!
Finally, if you are a Freelancer with a Dropbox application on your phone/laptop begging helplessly to be used, it’s high time you start using it.
Better still, are there other applications you use in preserving your documents against loss other than your email ad and Dropbox, we’d love you to share with us? Drop them in the comment section below!
Happy Freelancing.
admin
