How to avoid data loss?

[peter88213]

In principle, novelibre is designed to secure its data as well as possible. Files are neither overwritten nor completely deleted, but backup files with the extension .bak are created. There is even a function to restore the last backup. Even in the event of program errors, novelibre attempts to continue running after a warning in order to give the users a chance to save their work (which cannot be guaranteed, however).

In addition, the novel text and metadata are available multiple times in the form of Open/LibreOffice documents, depending on how the user works, and the additional backup methods of OpenOffice and LibreOffice can also be used. The novel should thus be reasonably protected against accidental changes.

However, as we had to learn, none of this is of any use if the entire project directory is cleared by mistake. Many writing programs, including LibreOffice, therefore have a data backup mechanism that saves backup copies in a different location outside the document directory. I considered introducing this for novelibre as well, but decided against it because there is very powerful third-party software for this, which users are free to choose.

I use Backup Service Home with Windows, which writes changed files to a USB stick every hour. Of course, I have to save often enough to ensure this. Windows has, if I'm not mistaken, a similar feature built in (file versions or something), and there is also the comparable rsync for both Windows and Linux.

For a while I also stored my data on Dropbox, but I stopped doing that because I don't want to hand over my novel texts. Just imagine Geroge Martin backing up his manuscript for the last volume of “A Song Of Ice And Fire” in the cloud!
Not to mention the fact that cloud data can be deleted from several different places at once.

As I write this, I'm becoming more and more convinced that novelibre should at least allow you to define a central backup directory. See #46.

I have also considered having novelibre create automatic backups during the running session to automatically restore the project after a program crash (#47), but this seems unnecessary to me due to the stability of the program and the availability of the ODT manuscript.

[peter88213]

Version 5.9+ now provides a viable backup solution.
I have summarized the whole topic again in a separate chapter of the manual.