What Should an Author Keep Backed Up?

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Unpublished work: outlines, series bibles, notes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.