It’s one thing to write a first draft of anything — short story, novel, essay — and save it to a hard drive or to iCloud or to Dropbox or to Goggle Docs or to a thumb drive. That’s one document saved somewhere. But when you have several short stories and a few drafts of each one, or perhaps a few versions of one novel, how do you organize your writing?

Currently, I’m using Dropbox which was fine until I needed to find some stories I had written years ago. I thought I had saved everything to Dropbox but … of course, I hadn’t. In searching for these old nuggets of gold on my hard drive, I found duplicates galore. The same story saved in multiple locations, but not the version I was looking for. I eventually found what I wanted but it was a nail-biting experience.

Over the years, I’ve had to adjust how I organize my files, and I know I’ve lost some in the process. Going from floppy disks (I’m that old) to 3.5 hard disks to various iterations of the Cloud. It’s appealing to use the Cloud and believe that I can access my work from any computer anywhere as long as there’s an internet connection. Of course, when you have an internet connection but the vendor’s server goes down, you’re screwed.

So my challenge is two-fold: (1) organize my writing so I can find what I want when I want it; and (2) find a reliable location to store my work.

I would really love to know what you do to store and organize your writing. I know I could learn from you. Please share in the comments section.