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On writing

Life in the cloud is great until the cloud stops working

The internet was down yesterday.

Outside on the street I could see four massive cherry-pickers, at least twenty workers and one new power pole. I’m not sure why the internet was off and the power was on when they were working on the electricity but it was.

You would think that time off the internet would give you time to write without distractions.

It’s good if you are writing your first draft. It’s not so good when you’re in the middle of edits. Especially if you are using the cloud to share files.

Nowadays if you want to share edits and you’re both working on those edits at the same time, it will probably be via some form of server connection. For most of us, that means the internet.

If the cloud worked the way spin doctors told us it would, being off-line shouldn’t matter. I would make my edits on my version, Sherylyn would make hers on her version and when the internet came back up the two files would synchronise and all would be fine.

Except as anyone who’s tried to sync files will tell you, it doesn’t work like that. File synchronisation is an inexact science at best. It’s still very buggy. Sometimes it seems that the moons have to be aligned, you’ve touched your lucky rabbit’s foot, and prayed to all the gods you can think of just to make it work properly, and woe betide if you do these things in the wrong order.

Be paranoid. Be very paranoid. Back. Up. Everything. Every day. Twice a day if you feel more comfortable.

Check before you start working on a document, just to be sure that you have synched, because sometimes the synchronisation gets out of order and an old version overwrites a newer one.

The internet came back up at 4pm. I have to say, the editing went much faster after that.

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