Back up your books

Your books are saved as you write, and Write keeps them safe on its side. A backup is something extra: a copy of your own, on your own computer, that you can open without Write and restore from if you ever need to. It's worth making one now and then—before a big revision, say, or at the end of a draft.

What's in a backup

A backup is a single .zip file. Inside are two things:

• Plain files anyone can read. Every scene as its own text file, in folders by chapter, and the whole manuscript in one file, in reading order. Your front and back matter is there too. They're written in Markdown, which is ordinary text with a few marks—*italics*, **bold**—so any text editor or word processor can open them, today or in twenty years.
• The exact record, in a folder called write. This is everything Write needs to put the book back exactly as it was: scenes, sections, notes, pictures, comments and suggestions, and who you'd shared it with. You don't need to open this part; it's there so a restore can be complete.

If a scene has suggested changes that haven't been accepted yet, the readable files show the text as though they had been—the same way a build does. The exact record keeps the suggestions as suggestions.

Back up one book

1. Open the book and choose Publish (in the Book menu, or the Publish button in the toolbar).
2. Near the bottom, in the Backup card, click Download a backup.
3. It appears in the Files list beside your other builds after a moment. Click Download to save it.

Screenshot: the Publish window scrolled near the bottom, showing the Backup card with its Download a backup button and the Files list where the backup appears.

Back up all your books at once

1. In the Library, in the bar near the bottom, under Back up, click All my books.
2. Click Back up everything now.
3. Write makes a backup of each of your books, in the background, and puts them all in one .zip. You can close the window and carry on writing; when it says Ready, click Download.

The window keeps a list of your recent library backups, so you can download one again later.

Screenshot: the backup window opened from All my books in the Library, showing the Back up everything now button, a backup marked Ready with its Download button, and the list of recent library backups.

This covers the books you own. Books other people have shared with you are theirs to back up.

Your codex is backed up separately

A codex belongs to a universe rather than to any one book, so it isn't inside a book's backup. When you back up all your books, the window lists each of your codexes with a link—Back up the … codex—that downloads it on its own: a readable page for each entry, the pictures, and the exact record. You can also download one from the codex itself, with its Back up button.

Where to keep them

Anywhere you keep other important files: a folder on your computer that's backed up, a cloud drive, an external disk. A backup holds the whole book, so treat it the way you'd treat the manuscript itself.

To bring a backup back in, see Restore from a backup.