Lemme mention how I’ve geeked out on all this writing
Cron-job to back up my regular files to another BIG hard drive, runs every six hours, rotates to a new folder every month. YES, this has bailed me out on more than one occasion with “didn’t mean to wipe out/overwrite a file”. Every several months, usually when my file-explorer shows the disk to be full, do I go and clear out those really old copies.
In theory, also backing them up with subversion (a source control software coders can use…) But I’ve kinda let that one slip.
WROTE a formatting tool, it’ll take marked up text files, spit out files formatted to the different archives I use (AFF, AO3, & FFN) or even ordinary HTML (using CSS). It’s even got a filtering feature that I lean on to make the explicit vs cleaner versions of my potter fanfic. (Note, if you’re not afraid of compiling software, of using the command line, I open source this utility, it’s up on GITHUB.)
Writing a database software for tracking my story details, this has been an ongoing project since it first started in java many years ago, when I realized that spiral notebooks were getting more & more obnoxious… and I tended to not check them like I should. It’s now evolved into a web-server with sqlite (for caching), that’s effectively becoming a wiki with attributes, that repeatedly scan your database in files for changes – it’s very much a WIP. I want to bring the automatic family-tree graph back from an earlier version (I’ll be overjoyed when I do). For those that aren’t also software developers… I’ve seen advertisements for World Anvil, it might be equivalent to what I want to do, not sure, but then I like controlling my own data files, not willing to trust them to the “cloud”.
And, been building/maintaining two databases (ie directories with lots of files), one for the potter fanfic, the other for my originals.
I know this doesn’t address the dragon prints head on, but it’s why I worry less… got nice HTML browsable versions of my stories on my drive. On occasion, I do have to verify the formatting after I post, so that’s why I’d like this feature myself … it’d be good for the author to be able to check w/o bumping the counter.
One suggestion, as you’re the author, save-em from the archive so you’ve got a local copy w/o having to rummage into that old computer.