Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow automatically take a snapshot of your Scrivener novel's content and automate daily or weekly back-ups from your Mac to another location? Using Automator, it’s actually really easy.

Preparation

The following example assumes you have Panic's Transmit ftp software, which integrates well with Automator, to do backups to an FTP server. You can actually use Automator to backup files anywhere you want though -- another directory, your iDisk, you name it.

Open Automator

Launch Automator (find it in your Applications folder), scroll down the left column (Library) to find and select Transmit, grab the “Synchronize Files” action from the middle column (Actions) and drag it over to the workflow area on the right. Drag in other automator actions as appropriate. Following are some screenshots (click on the thumbnail to enlarge) to show you how I set up my backup workflow.

Here are the workflow steps you will need by the time you are done.

Add a 'Get Specified Finder Items' step. Here select your working Scrivener file. You can backup other files at this step as well.

Feed these files into a 'Create Archive' step. This will archive your files into a .zip folder.

You will want to have a separate copy of the backup each time you save. This gives you a version control system where you can always find versions of the file from days or weeks ago should you ever delete something and then not discover it till some time later! Add a 'Rename Finder Items' step and configure it to add the date to the filename.

Add another 'Rename Finder Items' step and configure it to add the time to the filename (this allows us to have multiple backups in one day).

Add the Transmit option to 'Upload Files' and configure it to the FTP server of your choice (or use Stronghold, cf. ...). Here you could instead copy the files to another disk attached to your Mac if you prefer.

Run a test to see if things work. You hit the play button near the top right corner of the Automator window, watch Transmit open up, connect to your FTP server, change to the correct directory, change the local path to the correct directory, then start uploading the Scrivener file. Once it’s done, it disconnects and closes Transmit. Perfect!

Running Backup On Demand
Save this Automater script to your Desktop (or wherever you like) choosing the “Application” file format, saving the file as BackupScrivener.app This creates a clickable application on your desktop that will launch the back-up whenever you like. You can also add this script as a plugin to your scripts menu so that you can backup right from your Mac's main menu.

Scheduling

Let’s say you want to schedule BackupScrivener.app to run automatically daily.

Open up iCal (yes, iCal!), and for the sake of clarity, create a new calendar (File > New Calendar) called “Scheduled Tasks”. Create a new event for this coming Friday "Scrivener Backup" with the following details:

• scheduled for 11am
• set to repeat daily (ending “Never”)
• an alarm that opens BackupScrivener.app 0 minutes before the event

Here’s a screen shot of the event:

Every Friday at 11am (a time my computer is usually on, and I’m probably looking for a second cup of coffee) iCal will trigger the backup, backing up my novel to the server from my local disk.

Other Features

• This will work if iCal or Transmit are already open or closed, which is nice.
• You can drag in multiple File actions to one Automator workflow, so you can bundle all your weekly back-ups of different folders into one script and one iCal event, then make another one for daily or monthly tasks.
• It’s an Automator workflow, so you can do all kinds of stuff – ask for a confirmation before running, tell it to send you an email afterwards, run an AppleScript, open your Strongspace account in Safari, etc etc.

Thanks to Stronghold

I’m not sure I would have ever thought of combining Transmit, Automator and iCal like this – the credit goes to the Strongspace blog. Check out their article on backing up files to Strongspace if you don't have an FTP server.

Looking at submission guidelines from a variety of CBA publishers at the Faith, Hope & Love website, it looks like 90,000 words is a good all-around target for a novel length. But you have to write more than 90k words to get 90k words.

I like Steven King's axiom for 1st draft versus 2nd draft word counts:

2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%

So, to target 90,000 final draft words, write 100,000 words!

Finally, a (nearly) perfect novel writing tool. Scrivener software (still in beta) is a light-weight but innovative software tool exclusively for Macintosh users. You can download a beta version for free at http://www.literatureandlatte.com. Click on the thumbnail images for full screenshots.

Scrivener's outlining and note card capability allow you to organize your novel. You can annotate and categorize content in ways to allow you to flexibly craft the outline to the way you write.

Scrivener also has a full-screen mode text editor that whose background color is an eyeball-friendly black. No distractions and a slim column complete this optimized environment for the serious writer.