Please note! This post is related to old versions of bibisco (from 2.0 to 2.2). Recent versions are covered here.

What are the best practices for securely managing bibisco projects?

This is one of the questions that bibisco users ask me most, so in this post, we will analyze how bibisco stores projects and the safest way to manage them.

Let’s start from the beginning: bibisco is a desktop application, just like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, and it stores all the data on your computer.

Therefore, there are no copies of your work on the web: neither at bibisco.com nor at Gumroad, the e-commerce platform that distributes bibisco.

In this way, only you have a copy of your work and you can even work without an internet connection.

OK, but… where does bibisco save my projects?

bibisco projects’ directory

bibisco stores all the data in the projects’ directory that you choose at the first execution of bibisco:

If the directory you have chosen already contains projects, they will be automatically imported.

This feature is particularly useful when you update bibisco: you have to download the new version, unzip it, and choose the directory you were working on as the projects’ directory: that’s it!

You can always change the location of your projects’ directory from the settings:

The right location, the right name

It’s very important to choose the right location and the right name for the bibisco projects’ directory.

The projects’ directory should have a well recognizable name, for example bibisco-projects, and should be located in a location where we usually store the files we produce, for example in the Documents directory.

For this reason, you should absolutely avoid choosing the desktop or the download directory as the projects’ directory.

The main risk of choosing a wrong name and a wrong position is, after some time, no longer recognizing the directory as a bibisco project directory and therefore deleting it, risking losing all the work.

Projects’ directory structure

The projects directory has this structure:

and it has 4 main elements.

1) Projects’ directory (purple arrow)

It’s the projects’ directory you choose.

2) _internal_bibisco2_projects_db_ (green arrow)

It’s the parent directory of all projects.

3) Specific project directory (blue arrow)

It’s the specific project directory that contains:

• a JSON file (cyan arrow) that is the project file.
• images directory (black arrow) that contains the images of the project.

4) Backup (red arrow)

It’s the backup directory where, every time bibisco starts, every project is exported as an archive (file with extension .bibisco2).

Each archive file has a significant name:

• title of the project (orange line)
• identifier of the project (pink line)
• timestamp of backup in the form YEAR_MONTH_DAY_HOURS_MINUTES_SECONDS (yellow line).

How bibisco helps you securely managing your projects: auto-save and auto-backup

bibisco has two features that help you secure your work: auto-save and auto-backup.

The auto-save feature activates every time you open the text editor or relationship diagram and automatically saves your work every 60 seconds.

Every time bibisco starts, the auto-backup feature export every project in the projects’ directory as an archive (file with extension .bibisco2) and put it in the backup subdirectory.

What can YOU do to securely managing your projects: make regular backups!

Even if we think that it can never happen to us, unfortunately, accidents happen: our computer can be stolen, it can fall from our hands and crash on the ground, we can pour coffee over it and make it unusable, the hard drive can corrupt and become unreadable.

So, what can we do to avoid the loss of our work?

We have to make regular backups of our novel, exporting it as archive or in docx format, and store them outside of our computer: on an external hard-disk or on a USB stick.

Save your projects on a cloud drive

A very effective way to securely managing your projects is to save them on a cloud drive.

In this way you have an automatic backup in secure storage and also you have the possibility to work on your project from different computers.

To save your projects on a cloud drive, for example, Dropbox or Google Drive, you simply have to choose as projects’ directory, a directory on your computer that is synchronized with your cloud drive.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve learned what are the best practices for securely managing bibisco projects, you can focus on creating your great novel.

Therefore, happy writing with bibisco!