Backup or be damned

If nothing else, the latest bushfire incident at Vocal Media has reminded us that the platform, for that matter all online platforms, are by their nature, unstable and unsafe. Each time this has happened, we have been told that it is as a result of some kind of a cyber attack. There have been several of these incidents this year and the Vocal team is to be congratulated for being able to resolve these incidents.

I would have put an embedded link to my lyrical account of the problem here but the system currently will not allow it: I hope this link works

This has happened before, too, and the problem may only be temporary as it was before, so I am not overly worried. If you have any problem linking Vocal stories, try putting a "?" at the end of the URL which sometimes works. Not in the above case, as the 403 error message I got, when I tried it, shows.

As to the immediate problem, Justin@Vocal kindly gave an assurance which I hope he doesn't mind me quoting:

Raymond, we’re working on it. We’ve been battling a DDoS attack but the platform stayed up (technically, though performance was degraded), so it didn’t trigger the alert page. That’s why you’ve been seeing issues. Things are starting to come back online now, and our team is actively monitoring. We’re also strengthening our safeguards so this doesn’t happen again. Thanks so much for bearing with us.

When I asked specifically about whether Vocal could provide a feature to allow creators to backup their work, he said:

We’re working on some major platform updates in the background, and giving creators a way to download all of their work is definitely on that list. We’ll share more as those updates roll out, but please know that safeguarding your content is a top priority for us.

And further reassurance about the need (or otherwise) for us to backup our stories:

Thanks so much for sharing your concerns, everyone. I want to reassure you that all stories on Vocal are safe and securely backed up. Even when we experience disruptions like the recent DDoS attacks, those only affect site performance temporarily, they do not put your content at risk.

Our engineering team has multiple safeguards in place to protect creator work, and we’re continuing to strengthen those defenses. We understand how important your stories are, and keeping them safe will always be our top priority.

This is all very helpful and reassuring to know. From Vocal, I wouldn't expect it to be otherwise, but it is good to have this confirmed. Regardless, I have started, and will continue, to backup my work as a matter of good practice and risk reduction, even if the risk is low, as Justin suggests.

I have tried this in the past, however, and have yet to get further than a dozen or so stories. Given the current scare, I have decided to renew my efforts to back everything up. I have started by backing up all of my crime fiction works, which number a total of 32 stories in the fiction community. These are works that I plan to publish as a collection, so I would need to download the text in any case in order to compile the book. I am hoping a creator backup facility, as suggested above, does eventually materialise. In the meantime, I will continue to have my own backup binges from time to time. My next backup campaign will be to secure my poetic works, again because I plan to publish a collection.

With over 500 stories published on Vocal, it could take some time to back everything up but, as I say, my focus will be on those fictional stories, poems, and some of my art reviews and articles, all of which I may publish in book or other form at some point.

How to do the backup is of course an issue.

Simplest way is probably to copy and paste each page into a document, saved locally or in some 'cloud' place, like Google Drive, iCloud or whichever you care to chose. There is the question of whether you save your stories formatted, or as plain text. Having tried various alternatives, this is what I am doing for my current backup spate.

Open the Vocal story

Highlight and copy headline and subhead

Paste into a spreadsheet at the top of column A

Copy and paste the remaining story text into column A

Delete any in-line images

Copy and paste second story into column B

Save the Excel document to your computer or cloud storage as you continue to copy and paste into your backup spreadsheet, each story held in a single spreadsheet column.

Why did I decide to back the story up in a spreadsheet? Because the text of our stories is represented by digital data. By saving this data in a structured format it is easier and quicker to save, access and subsequently to organise.

If you store the data in a word-processing document (like Word or Google docs) you will end up with a very long document that is hard to manage and may cause problems when the file gets too big. Storing in a structured format is far easier. Storing your stories as individual documents would take a lot longer and it will be that much harder to then compile them into a single document for book publishing or other such purposes.

If you look at the screenshot showing my spreadsheet story backup above, you will see that I have a third line below the heading and subhead. This is where I have added some keywords to help locate stories when I need to. One of the advantages of storing your stories in this format is that you are able to add data to the structured data in a way that it may help you to sort the information at a later point. Perhaps if, like me, you intend to compile any of your work for subsequent further editing and book publication.

Publish and be damned

You could, for instance, add a row with a word count, classification of your stories by genre, a personal rating so you can quickly identify your best stories. Once you have stored your data (stories, poems...) in a structured format, there are many ways you could subsequently organise the work.

Of course you may find a better, quicker, more efficient and effective way to backup your Vocal stories. If you do, please share.

Hopefully we will soon have the Vocal backup facility being considered by the team. I will look forward to hearing about this.

Meantime... keep on backing up!

Thanks for reading

Ray