This is the least interesting thing on the checklist. It is also the only one where skipping it costs the whole project rather than a few marks. I set mine up on a Sunday evening and have thought about it twice since.
01Three, two, one, in plain terms
The rule is older than any of the software you use and it has not needed changing. Three copies of the work. On two different kinds of storage. One of them somewhere else.
For a student that is not expensive. Copy one is the folder on your laptop, which is the one you work in. Copy two is the same folder synced to a cloud account, which is the copy that is somewhere else. Copy three is a physical drive — an external SSD, or a cheaper spinning hard drive — that you plug in and copy to. Two kinds of storage means the copies do not all fail for the same reason. A laptop and a drive both fail as objects. A cloud account fails as an account. Nothing you can do to one of those does anything to the other.
The “somewhere else” half matters more than it sounds. A drive that lives in the same bag as the laptop is one stolen bag away from being no copies at all. Leave the drive at home, or at a parent’s house, and let the cloud account be the copy that travels.
A dead laptop has ended more projects than a bad design has. A bad design can still be submitted.
02Set the three copies up tonight
One evening, once, at the start of the project. It is not a thing you come back to.
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Put the project folder inside the cloud folder
Not a copy of it. The folder itself, moved into OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud Drive, so that the folder you work in and the folder in the cloud are the same folder. This is the single change that does the most, and it takes one drag. Making one project folder in week one is what turns this into a single drag rather than nine.
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Wait, and check it finished
Leave it on mains power, plugged into wired internet or good Wi-Fi, and let it upload. A first upload of a project with site photographs and a model in it is not a five-minute job. Do not close the lid.
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Copy the whole folder to a physical drive
Plug in the SSD, drag the project folder onto it, wait. This copy is deliberately dumb. No syncing, no software, nothing clever that can go wrong quietly — a folder you can see, on a drive you can hold.
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Set one repeating reminder
Sunday evening, every week, one line: plug in the drive and drag the folder over. Copy three only protects you up to the last time you made it. A weekly reminder means the worst case is losing a week, and a week is survivable.
03Syncing is not backing up
This is the part people get wrong, and they get it wrong while feeling organised. Sync makes two places identical. That is the whole point of it, and it is also the problem: if you delete a file on your laptop, it is deleted in the cloud within seconds. If a file corrupts on save, the corrupted version is uploaded on top of the good one. If your machine picks up ransomware, the encrypted files sync too. Sync is excellent at spreading whatever happened. It has no opinion about whether what happened was good.
What saves you is versioning. OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox all keep previous versions of a file for a limited window, and you get at them the same way in each: find the file in the service’s web interface, right-click it, and look for Version history. Google Drive calls it Manage versions for files you have uploaded rather than created there. The length of the window is not the same across the three services, and it can differ again between a personal account and one your university supplies. Check yours before you need it, not after.
Do this once now, on any file: open the web interface, right-click, and confirm you can see an older version of something. Ten seconds, and it tells you whether the safety net you assume you have is actually there.
04Back up more than the InDesign file
An .indd file does not contain your images. It contains the position, the crop and the path to each one. Move the images, rename the folder they sit in, or copy the document to a drive without them, and the file opens as a document full of grey boxes where the drawings used to be — with every caption and every line of type still in place, which somehow makes it worse.
So back up the folder, not the document. For the moment you need to hand the whole thing to somebody there is a shortcut: File > Package, which gathers the document, its fonts and a Links folder with every placed image into one folder. That packaged folder is the thing to keep. The InDesign portfolio template is being built to package that way, fonts and all. The same logic applies to the rest of it — the Rhino or CAD file without its textures and blocks, the After Effects project without its footage. Back up the container, never the single file.
Then prove it works, which takes ten minutes and is the only part of this that counts. Go to a library computer or a friend’s laptop. Sign into the cloud account, download one real file from the backup — a working drawing, not a text document — and open it. If it opens, you have a backup. If it does not, you have a folder that looks like a backup, and you have found out on a Tuesday in week two instead of at 2am in week eleven.
Do
Restore one file onto a machine that is not your laptop and open it, once, at the start of the project. A library computer is enough. Ten minutes, and it is the only test that means anything.
Don’t
Assume the cloud icon means it uploaded. A paused sync, a metered connection and a laptop that had its lid shut mid-upload all sit there looking like nothing is wrong. The icon reports intention, not arrival.
Do the drag tonight, set the Sunday reminder, and open one file from the backup on a machine that is not yours. The rest of the checklist protects your marks. This one protects the work existing at all.