Writing.Com General Discussion

Mailing your work to yourself may work in the United States, but not in Europe, and it is easily challenged. I've taken to using a wiki farm to do my initial writing on - that is, take it to final draft. After that I can take it over to Scrivener or a word-processor for final polishing. Why use a wiki? Every edit is saved. Every minor tinker. Each time I save, it stores a reverse-delta file of the document it is replacing. Nothing is ever lost. Handing your solicitor every edit of every scene from first draft to final is much more convincing evidence that you brought the story to life than any time-based first- or final-draft (which can be faked, even using the postal method).

A delta file is a set of instructions on how to change an original document into a later version. A reverse-delta stores a set of instructions on how to change any version into the previous one (and storing the latest version of the document as the starting point), allowing you to roll-back to any previous version. These are small text-based files that are usually stored (collectively) in a compressed archive, so take up very little disk space.

A wiki farm is a where the wiki software is installed once, but multiple wikis can be maintained. Each wiki can have its own configuration. I use DokuWiki because it stores all its data (the pages and reverse-deltas) in plain text files, making it extremely easy to backup and restore.