For those of us living in the middle-class realm of the First World, we are coming up on a crux: living offline or online. This is less an issue about social media, where we have all invested at least a part of ourselves – even if only LinkedIn for the sake of our professional careers – than about actual productivity.
Adobe Creative Suite and Windows Office are both now almost exclusively online services. Your license to use the software is based on monthly or annual fees, not on a one-time purchase of a specific version of the software. If anyone believes that this isn’t the wave of the future overtaking us, they need to put down the luddite kool-aide and pay attention. After all, this is almost exclusively the model for a lot of mobile app services. Right now my subscriptions include Pandora, Office 365, gQueues, Out of Milk, and Penzu. My data is all “out there”.
Mostly.
Except for my writing.
I’m used to being very tight-fisted with my writing, creating redundant backups (cloud, hard drive, external drive) and generally only working from one place (my desktop). But I’m finding that I tend to write from my laptop as much as my desktop, and I like being able to tap into files from my phone to add things I think of on the fly. This is a problem for me because as a professional author, I don’t use MS Word or any other wonky “word processing” software, I use scrivener.
Now, scrivener is fabulous, and I love it. The only time I use MS Word is…well, on my laptop, or at work. For my creative writing, I only want to use scrivener.
For my “old school” self, this isn’t an issue. My licensed version of scrivener is on my desktop computer and that’s where the project files are too (backed up, of course). But that means I can only do creative writing at my desktop.
So here’s the conundrum: scrivener licensing allows me to put a second copy of the software on my laptop, I guess because they understand that people like me exist. But if the working project files only exist on my desktop, then there is no point in using scrivener on my laptop. The only way this would work how I want it to is for me to put the working project files in the cloud (dropbox being my preferred service) but as much as I appreciate that convenience, there is a part of me screeching about loss of control of my files. Also, if I’m offline, I can’t reach them at all. I’d also have to start backing up those files manually by saving them to my hard drive, which is a reverse of the process I have now which is done automatically by scrivener (which saves a back-up copy to dropbox every time I close a project file).
This is obviously not something that keeps me awake at night. And, I suspect, it is also mostly a reflection of my age and background. Those of us who were computer-savvy before the era of the Internet have trouble with the idea of not having our files physically in a specific location that we own and control – e.g. a hard drive of some sort that actually lives in our home. The fact is that they are more at risk in that location than in professional file hosting services is not lost on me, but still…habit. (This is discounting the privacy concern issues, which really are a separate post unto themselves; here, I’m just talking about productivity and convenience issues.)
Decisions, decisions…
