Does anyone here use any sort of central archive that has descriptions or notes about all of your works? Something that might let you search by text or description? I tend to forget where I put stuff (Even when I’m organized), so some kind of searchable database would be great.

This, by the way, is why I love gmail so much. just archive it, and do a search for it. No more delving through folders to see where I put stuff.

I use a novel writing program to do longer pieces in, short stories and poems are done in Word. I guess this is why I hadn’t thought of keeping separate drafts. The longer pieces I keep on a flash drive so I can work on them on either my desktop or laptop. Finished projects I also keep a hard copy of, but not the drafts.

My documents folder is a mess. Parts of it are fairly organized, to a point. I do an official fansite for a Canadian actor and have folders for images and files he sends and separate source files for the images I use on the site, the actual site files for it as well as images and page files for the other more personal sites I do. I also do image work for family and a few friends, photo jobs I’ve done for people, ones they’ve sent for me to look over, and stories and pieces others have sent for me to proofread. Then there are things my kids have had me do.

Needless to say that over the years my documents has accumulated many things, a good share I neglect to backup and boot myself in the keester whenever I have computer problems. I guess I need to take the time and become an organizing freak, especially now that I’m working on serious projects.

Thanks Randy! Any volunteers to come and dig through all my media for me??

Oh yeah - all data on the USB drives are Zipped with password protection and 256 bit encryption.

Double Vision is out of print already? I thought Tyndale just archived everything with Lightning Source. Or was that Zondervan?

Not for writing, but in the past I’ve used version control systems (RCS) software, also known as source code management (SCM) software. Usually it’s used for management of the myriad of files and file versions for engineering projects. It’s possible to keep track of a large project consisting of hundreds or thousands of files with dozens of people working on the project. Wikipedia has a couple of fine articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Prompted by Wiki I poked around in OpenOffice Writer (word processor) and figured out it has a mini-rev control built into the files. You can keep all your named versions of each file within that file. Only the latest is visible unless you explicitly ask for an earlier revision. It doesn’t look like it can correlate a single revision set across multiple files. That Wiki article says that Microsoft Word has a similar feature.

One painful lesson I learned with the somewhat primitive RCS software we were using for a chip design project is that it doesn’t really care much for binary files… such as MS Word, Excel, etc. So if you’d think you’d like to try RCS/SCM make sure the software knows you’re feeding it a binary file.

Files are kept in a database called a repository and you can stick the repository anywhere–including on a remote machine. Some RCS/SCM software requires a separate server and some will run on your PC.

It might look like a specialized tool that only software developers would use, but RCS/SCM really is a general purpose tool that anyone can use. It’s just that very few computer users who are not programmers even know it exists.