How To… write a novel on your Mac

• Article 70 of 89
• MacFormat, April 2009

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Indeed, backing up is an important thing to remember: the last thing you want is your 300-page magnum opus disappearing into the Well of Lost Plots simply because one little sector on your hard drive got corrupted when you dropped your laptop a couple of months ago.

Leopard users, of course, have access to Time Machine, which when switched on automatically backs up all their data to an external hard drive or server. Provided, of course, they have such a thing - if they don't, a quick trip to Currys, Amazon.co.uk or other retailer is highly recommended, since you can get 1TB of storage for less than £90 now, which should back up any novel as well as iPhoto and iTunes libraries and still have plenty to spare.

Alternatively or even in addition, if you like a belt and braces approach, a MobileMe subscription (http://www.apple.com/mobileme/) and Apple's Backup software are great ways to back up data online, so even if your house catches fire, your debut in the literary world will be safeguarded "in the cloud" as well.

By default, Time Machine is set to back up every hour, which might not suit anyone doing heavy editing. Because what often gets overlooked is the "oops, I didn't mean to delete that bit" problem: you've been writing and you decide that what you've written isn't quite right, delete it and then a few minutes, hours or days later you realise that maybe you could have kept some of it because it could be useful elsewhere. Except you can't because you only have the latest backup, not the backup you made three versions ago.

Fortunately, you can use TimeMachineEditor (http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/) to set the backup interval to a frequency of more than once an hour to ensure your peace of mind. But what Time Machine won't tell you is exactly which version of your document contained the text you wanted and you won't know until you've restored it. Get Backup does at least provide an easy way to restore all versions of a document that can then be searched with Spotlight.

However, a better strategy is simply to use an old version of Word, if you have one, in combination with a backup strategy. Although Word 2008 doesn't have a "versioning" feature, Word 2004 and earlier let you store many different versions of the same document in a single .doc file; you can do this manually whenever you want to have a distinct draft of the document or automatically every time you save the document. Then, if you want to recover a lost bit of text, all you need to do is get Word to open all the versions in separate windows and then search through all open documents for a relevant keyword or phrase to find the deleted text.

However, what you might find as you're writing your novel is that you'll write chapter 1 in one document, then chapter 2 in another then chapter 4 in another, revise your ideas in chapter 1 so make a backup of it then start editing it., maybe cut and paste a bit from chapter 2 into chapter 1 and so on. But rather than using a backup system, you may maintain your own manual backup system - a folder with all the versions of all the chapters you've written. Before you know it, you've got a huge collection of files, maybe containing just snippets of text that you want to keep. So some kind of project management software can come in useful once you've really got cracking.

Ulysses (http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses) is a combination of word processor (with the near obligatory fullscreen mode) and filing system with backup functions. But instead of making you bend to its particular way of doing things, tries to be as free-form as possible, letting you devise the categories and structures you want for your writing. CopyWrite (http://www.bartastechnologies.com/products/copywrite/) attempts to do a similar job, but isn't quite as sophisticated as Ulysses but will appeal to some - particularly since it's free for small projects.

These both offer file project management, allowing you to tag and filter files, preview them, and search them: want to know all the chapters where Silas the Gardener appears or gets mentioned? They will do the job and usually far more quickly and precisely than Spotlight.

You can of course use this method and your chosen word processor to store information about characters in your novel and for things like timelines in other files. But database software such as Filemaker's Bento (http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/overview.html) can be a help with a little bit of effort, as can Omni Outliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/) and Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), which are good organisational tools for notes, tasks and ideas.

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