Doomsday Prepping: Writer's Edition

One of those inane questions on Critique Circle:  How do you organize your WIP?  To my surprise there were these people with elaborate systems for their work.  Like they have a file for each chapter!  How else can you keep track of what chapter you're on?  Um, Find in Word or Google Docs?  That's what I've done for years.  And one guy took it up a notch from that:  I have a folder for each part and a file for each chapter and I have three copies:  one on my computer, one in Google Drive, and one on a thumb drive!

And he added:

An IT friend of mine once told me that any data you don't have at least three backups of is data you don't really care about. He also recommended having at least one backup in an offline location (as protection against loss of internet access and virus corruption).

Which just seems ridiculously paranoid to me.  It is like those "Doomsday Preppers" who build elaborate bomb shelters with years of food and toilet paper and stuff.  I suppose someday they'll be right and Doomsday will come and that'll show us--who are all dead now.  My opinion on those scenarios is to quote Krusty the Klown:  I think the survivors would envy the dead.  Who wants to live in a nuclear-blasted wasteland like Mad Max?  Ugh.

Anyway, I guess you can go to all this trouble, but really I think the joke will be on you.  An issue with modern films is that so many are shot on digital, but the problem is that those formats might not be readable even 20 years from now.  Meaning we'll be deprived of masterpieces like Transformers 5!  Oh no!  How will future generations watch our terrible action movies?  This is similar to problems with early films where the film they shot it on was easily combustible and so lots of early prints were lost.  It's why some early movies like Metropolis end up being cobbled together from scrounged footage and sometimes they have to splice in descriptions for stuff that has been lost.

Now then, if you really want to save your manuscript forever, what's the best way to preserve it?  The old-fashioned way:  Paper!  Paper in a bag maybe that's in an airtight box or safe.  Because all that stuff on the Cloud or on a PC or thumb drive might wind up unaccesiable if there's some cataclysm that wipes out society.  There might not be an Internet or even electricity.  Or computers might advance so far that the data you stored is no longer readable.  Think of just 25 years ago when most data was still stored on 3.5" disks.  About the only way to access anything on one of those is to go to a museum.  I mean I still have a box of old disks with story files but I don't have any computers operational with a floppy drive.  Even then a lot of them were formatted for Apple II computers; you'd probably have to go to the Smithsonian or Apple's spaceship campus to find one of those.

So I think if you're really so paranoid about losing shit, you should just print it out every day (the whole thing) and keep it locked in a safe.  Better yet, get three safes and have one at home and one at a friend's house and another one at your mom's house or somewhere.  And get a safe deposit box from the bank for a fourth copy.  Then you'll never lose anything and preserve your story for future generations, by which time all competition will be wiped out and so future humans (or aliens) will think you must have been the Shakespeare of your day!  (Provided they know who Shakespeare is still.)

Immortality awaits!