Manuscripts, cover and interior source files, and your publishing records. Follow the
3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two different kinds of media, with one off-site — encrypted
by you before it leaves your machine. Then restore one file from the backup to confirm it
works. Losing a manuscript to hardware failure is far more common than losing one to
theft.
The longer version
The three tiers, by how badly losing them hurts
Irreplaceable — back up obsessively
- The manuscript, current draft
- The final file for each published edition, matched to that edition. Reconstructing
which draft became the paperback three years later is miserable
- Cover source files — the layered original, not just the exported JPEG. Without it a
new format means paying for the design again
- Interior formatting source files
- Unpublished work: outlines, series bibles, notes
Painful — back up properly
- Publishing records: ISBNs, ASINs, blurbs and HTML blurbs, keywords, categories, prices,
buy links
- Contracts, editor agreements, cover licences
- Royalty statements and tax records
- Review excerpts and editorial quotes, captured when they appear
- Your email list export
Annoying — worth having
- Marketing graphics and ad creative
- Author photos at full resolution
- Website content
The 3-2-1 rule, concretely
- 3 copies — the working file plus two backups
- 2 media types — e.g. your computer and an external drive, or a drive and a cloud
service. Two folders on the same laptop is one copy
- 1 off-site — somewhere a house fire or a burglary would not reach
For the off-site copy, encrypt it yourself before uploading. Provider-side encryption at
rest means the provider holds the key. Encrypting locally and syncing the container gives
you the redundancy without handing over the contents.
The step everyone skips
Restore one file. Open it. Confirm it is the version you expect and that it is not
corrupt.
An untested backup is a rumor. Silent sync failures, half-finished uploads and
password-protected archives whose password is lost are all common, and all only discovered
at the worst moment.
Do it once a year. It takes five minutes.
A workable minimum
- Working copy on your machine
- Automatic sync to a cloud service (published material and general work)
- Monthly copy to an encrypted external drive kept somewhere else
- Annual restore test
That covers almost every realistic failure and costs the price of one drive.
Common exceptions
- Going fully local without fixing backups makes you worse off, not better. Privacy and
durability are separate problems and both need solving.
- Version history is not a backup — it lives inside the same account that can be lost.
- Ransomware encrypts connected drives too. At least one copy should be offline.
- Cloud "deletion" is delayed, not instant, which occasionally helps you and does not
count as a backup strategy.
Sources
- 3-2-1 backup rule, standard data-protection practice.
Verified 9 August 2026.