Which "app" do you use to write(and save your chapters, etc)?

[NapLovingImmortal]

Which app or website is best for saving chapters and other information for your work? Until now, I used Obsidian, but for some reason everything is gone. I am so pissed. The folder is still on my desktop as usual, but everything inside it has disappeared. Twenty-five chapters are gone. All my character sheets, worldbuilding, and power system notes are gone too. Is there any good website or something similar where I can store and save it without needing to worry?

 

[Envylope]

I use Libre Office, but you have to enable the autosave function. Not had any problems with losing chapters.

 

[pangmida]

First of all, really sorry about all your progress disappearing. I wonder if you could get it back somehow?

I just use the basic Google Docs. It’s online, autosaves so long as you have internet, and you can access it on mobile as well. You can invite other people to see your work and help edit too.

There’s always the classic Word doc as well.

I also know of Scrivener? The license is pretty expensive, but it has tons of functions designed for professional writing.

 

[Our_Lady_in_Twilight]

I just use Word, then paste into googledocs for editor collab.

Bonus Top Tip: don't let Word docs get too big, over 50k words or so it starts doing weird shit and can corrupt your project. Learned that the hard way.

 

[AstreiaNyx]

Google docs so I can write on my phone.

 

[tiaf]

I have an older version of word. I occasionally save offline. GDocs sometimes make stuff disappear and is absolutely slow with big documents; Browser and phone app. Word is better in that regard. I use Gdocs mostly for character sheets and references/notes for when I write on phone and can't open two docs at the same in word.

 

[TinaMigarlo]

I never had any issue with the humble Notepad. Basic Word, if I felt I needed formatting. But for just typing and saving text files, what more do you need to create and edit a text file for the love of god. Folder: book-name. "Rough Draft" folder holds, you guessed it. The originals. I copy the folder to do extensive edits. Creates a fail safe backup plan if i need it. text files are tiny in today's hard drives.

been a lot of years on Linux though, so notepad turned into "Xed", their better version of notepad. LIbreoffice is... the holy shit word processor for serious formatting and creating PDF's and everything else.

Now that I'm online with posting books, I just went back to working with Xed, again, linux's better notepad with more features but very easy to use. I don't trust "the cloud" so I just copy the "books" folder to a thumb drive now and then. Also a portable hard drive gets a backup of essential stuff at times.

honestly, what do you really need, to create and edit a damn text file. Expensive licensed software to write? Web apps? Please. A solution in search of a problem.

 

[KinaSkynight]

I use Google Drive to write, then I just copy and pasted

 

[LesserCodex]

I use Novlr, it's pretty good, you can write separate chapters inside a book, add a cover and everything.

 

[Emotica]

It's a ticking time bomb the further you step away from mainstream writing software. I've heard too many horror stories. Working in Docs or Word, backing up to the cloud, and having downloaded and external backups would be pretty much foolproof. I've never seen a platform with writing software that was worth abandoning the basics.

Also, with how quickly people throw accusations of A.I around these days, a software with version history might be essential in the next few years. Heck, even if you don't necessarily care about having to prove it one day, those version histories usually persist through a lot of catastrophes.

I'd say at the very least, if an author chooses to use a different writing software, that they should copy-paste it into something like words or docs. I have plenty of notes in different places so that way even if all that could reasonable go wrong goes wrong, it's just be a mild inconvenience to bounce back. Now that I think about it though, I haven't made a plan for solar flares, so of course a physical copy is a must.

I just scanned the other replies, and it seems most people agree on using something like Google Docs. The only downside is their character limit if you're a long-form writer, and they've been getting pushy with A.I proofreading over spellcheck, but it Docs is a good place to keep a master copy, and I find the formatting is preserved pretty well when uploading to various platforms.

 

[Zinless]

Patreon text editor

If I'm not feeling fancy, I would use Docs tho

 

[Emotica]

I just use Word, then paste into googledocs for editor collab.

Bonus Top Tip: don't let Word docs get too big, over 50k words or so it starts doing weird shit and can corrupt your project. Learned that the hard way.

Tell us more. Does this apply to Docs too? 50k really isn't that much for a document, so I wouldn't think it would corrupt so easily. Even the version history was corrupted? I've never kept such a large document in Word, but I used to be thoroughly impressed by all the fail-safes to prevent complete document loss.

I was planning to max out a Google Doc before swapping to another for a second part, but I didn't even think about corruption. I'd think cloud files would have a much harder time of being corrupted, especially with the technology we have to reverse the natural entropy on servers, but I don't know all that much about the technical aspects.

 

[Our_Lady_in_Twilight]

Tell us more. Does this apply to Docs too? 50k really isn't that much for a document, so I wouldn't think it would corrupt so easily. Even the version history was corrupted? I've never kept such a large document in Word, but I used to be thoroughly impressed by all the fail-safes to prevent complete document loss.

I was planning to max out a Google Doc before swapping to another for a second part, but I didn't even think about corruption. I'd think cloud files would have a much harder time of being corrupted, especially with the technology we have to reverse the natural entropy on servers, but I don't know all that much about the technical aspects.

Yep ok so once my Flamefrost master doc started going past 50k-ish words, the file started intermittently force closing and resetting randomly, stuttering and freezing. At that point it was still pretty functional though.

Then (I was up past 100k at this point) I opened it up and it only loaded the most recent few chapters, the first 80% or so completely gone. And then it immediately autosaved that corrupted doc as the definitive copy.

I was able to go back and load a previous version, thankfully (and of course the work exists on SH itself and other sites) but it was rather unsettling to see hundreds of hours just glitch out of existence for no reason. Following that I broke the project up into 'parts' of 50k each, and that seems to have made things more stable.

 

[Emotica]

(I was up past 100k at this point) I opened it up and it only loaded the most recent few chapters, the first 80% or so completely gone. And then it immediately autosaved that corrupted doc as the definitive copy.

I was able to go back and load a previous version, thankfully (and of course the work exists on SH itself and other sites) but it was rather unsettling to see hundreds of hours just glitch out of existence for no reason. Following that I broke the project up into 'parts' of 50k each, and that seems to have made things more stable.

That's an author horror story. Geez. Was the previous version super far back? I wonder how corporate/government workers and lawyers get around this. They're files are extremely long and they HAVE to be accurate an uncorrupted. It could all be redundancies with everything backed up dozens of times, but I'm surprised this is an issue in the 2020's. I thought we mastered the art of stored text.

 

[Our_Lady_in_Twilight]

That's an author horror story. Geez. Was the previous version super far back? I wonder how corporate/government workers and lawyers get around this. They're files are extremely long and they HAVE to be accurate an uncorrupted. It could all be redundancies with everything backed up dozens of times, but I'm surprised this is an issue in the 2020's. I thought we mastered the art of stored text.

Yeah luckily the autosave was very regular, I think I lost about 3-4 paragraphs and some editing. It was more an intangible panic than anything.

Who knows what the case is with gvt/corporate? If I had to guess either they have inhouse servers, or they get a premium 'pro-grade' cloud solution from Microsoft, while we home users get something more second rate. But who can really say for sure?

 

[seavmun88]

Just use Vim.

 

[Joyager2]

I’ve found that Docs gets a bit clunky to use after a certain word count. LibreOffice is lightweight and easy to use and its autosave/backup feature has helped me out more than once. I still make backups of my files from time to time, either in Dropbox or on another computer.

 

[Emotica]

I’ve found that Docs gets a bit clunky to use after a certain word count. LibreOffice is lightweight and easy to use and its autosave/backup feature has helped me out more than once. I still make backups of my files from time to time, either in Dropbox or on another computer.

Docs has a hard character limit. I'm not sure what happens when you reach it, but you wouldn't be able to type anymore. The clunkiness might be the auto-saving and attempt to keep everything loading at once from the cloud, so I'm not sure if it will ever truly corrupt, otherwise they'd probably just lower the character limit before that happened.

 

[Dec]

Which app or website is best for saving chapters and other information for your work?

Google Docs or a self-hosted instance of CryptPad is the go-to for me. Both allow me quick sharing and cooperation in real time, and this is really useful in my "job" as editor/corrector for some of the works here.

I’ve found that Docs gets a bit clunky to use after a certain word count.

Just add a new tab. If you go for ~2k words a chapter, then 20~25 chapters a tab is the golden zone.

 

[Joyager2]

Just add a new tab. If you go for ~2k words a chapter, then 20~25 chapters a tab is the golden zone.

I haven’t tried that, but I’d imagine it would work. Still, I prefer to have the whole manuscript in a single place. And I also prefer to have my documents local rather than relying on Google’s servers (my use of Dropbox is pretty limited).