How do I protect my files against any potential catastrophes?

It is good to be pessimistic when thinking about these things. What can happen to your lovely files?

* Mistake: you could overwrite or delete them by mistake.

* Hardware failure: the computer's hard drive could fail. The computer could catch fire. A visitor or their dog could knock it on the floor.

* Software failure: the system could crash, or damage files on the disk, or delete them. An app could do that. A virus could do that. InDesign might crash or fail while writing the file.

* External loss: the computer could be lost in fire, flood or confiscation.

* Passage of time: you might find after a long period that you could no longer read the files (e.g. because InDesign has been discontinued, or Mac/Windows no longer exist).

* Loss of service: your cloud provider could go out of business, or you might forget to pay a bill and find they delete all your stuff.

Think about your strategy for each catastrophe. Most solutions come down to lots of backups, held in different places, and different people's responsibility.  Getting back from mistakes or the discovery something was overwritten means you need a history of stuff, not just the latest.

I notice you say you've saved them to a hard drive, by which I assume you mean an external one. Just a check: some people call anything on an external drive a backup, but it's only a backup if it's a SECOND copy. Don't save from InDesign to an external drive. Use your internal drive and backup to external. Following a similar strategy, I'd never rely on just one Cloud provider.

A good strategy is three external drives, two of which live off site. At any time one might be in transit, but another is always off site. Then you need a rule for rotating, like weekly.

And my five cents -  acronis.com

My couple of cents: check out the Save with backup script by Gregor Fellenz (grefel).

— Kas

I wrote about this 5 years ago. It's only gotten better for Dropbox users and you can add OneDrive to the list of my recommendations now that they too have added version retention.

Why I Always Work in a Dropbox Folder and Why You Should, Too!

In short, you're doing the right thing but I will ask you, since you're using CS4, what operating system you're on? It's not likely to run properly on newer Macs or Windows machines.

Recommending one more type of backup: Export each file's content to either RTF text, XML, or HTML.

If your stories are important to you (and would be to your heirs in the future), INDD file might not be usable years from now (hard to imagine, but I've watched many top software companies disappear, along with their specific type of files that can no longer be opened).

RTF, XML, and HTML are generic content file types and should be usable many years from now for your great great grandchildren to read.

Also if you ever upgrade to a CC subscription, it has a Dropbox like feature. All you have to do is save your ID files (or any other application's file format) into the installed User>Creative Cloud Files folder and the files are automatically backed up to to a remote Adobe server after every save or change.

The maxim of backing up is "Only backup files you can't afford to lose." The way to achieve this is by creating daily, multiple unattended and redundant, back ups.

There are lots of books and articles out there about back-ups, but they generally all preach the same 3-2-1 strategy. Create 3 minimum copies of each file; keep 2 copies onsite, and 1 copy offsite. Here's a link to a good article on the 3-2-1 approach from Backblaze, a well-regarded online backup solution:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

Another excellent resource is the booklet, Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, by Joe Kissell. Lots of great advice here even if you're on Windows:

https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backing-up

For my own work I run multiple, unattended backups all day and every day via Dropbox, Backblaze, Time Machine, and SuperDuper! (from Shirt Pocket Software). Each solution fills a specific need. Since adopting this formula many years ago, I've never accidentally lost a file that could not be recovered.

Conventional wisdom says that it's not a question of if your hard drive will fail, but when. My growing collection of over a dozen dead external drives attests to this fact. Fortunately, when this happens I no longer panic, due to my system of automatic and redundant back ups.

Backup, Backup, Backup.

If you're working on a Mac, make sure to back up with time machine, and perhaps consider an offsite solution such as Backblaze or any other offsite backup.

So far as being able to open the file in the future, that's somewhat dependent on what software will be on the machine when you want to revisit the files in the future. Opening legacy files is always presents challenges in the future (i.e. earlier versions of software in newer software) because compatibility can't be guaranteed by software manufacturers, and operating systems change over time. That said, you can only take reasonable steps to make sure you can open your artwork in future, but there's no guarantee that future operating systems will be able to support older software or versions of InDesign; and similarly there's no guarantee in the future that future versions of InDesign will be able to open older versions of InDesign.

Hi Josh:

I prefer to save my InDesign docs to Dropbox. A lot of folks don't realize that it offers access to previously-saved versions, so if the current file is corrupted, you can access an earlier version.

File version history – Dropbox Help

Recover older versions of files – Dropbox Help

Another common workflow is to routinely save edited files with a new name on your local drive so that you create your own version history—just make sure your local drive is frequently backed up to different drive.

~Barb

Hi Josh,

you have listed us almost all technical capabilities (harddrive, dropbox ...). From my point of view there is not to forget your host provider. Either you store your works on his server or - if it's possible/necessary - you can rent space on this server, upon which users or content providers can upload content.

Hans-Günter