If you use a Mac, you will need two things. First, you will need a decent writing tool. You are probably a writer. A lot of Mac users seem to be writers of some sort or another. That said, in the age of blogging, who isn’t a writer? Like me, you’ve probably grown up on MS Word. A good few million words must have gone from my brain to paper via Word. Give it its dues. It’s been a great tool for word processing and still is. However, if you’re in the writing trade, especially creative writing, it isn’t long before you realise that the mere processing of words isn’t enough.

Part of any writing activity is the crafting of ideas, structure and meaning. Conversion to words is an iterative process. MS Word mostly assumes that you already know what you want to say and it simply lays out all the tools needed to put words to paper. If you want to make notes to self, play around with outlines and collect various scraps of writing into some kind of useful order, then Word falls down. It isn’t that good for writing a book or a research paper.

A tool that I’ve been using on the Mac is Scrivener. Go check it out. It is really an author’s tool rather than a word processor. In fact, it is hardly a word processor at all. It leaves that stuff to tools like Word as part of a downstream process. It still lacks some useful features that I would like to see, such as tools to visually map outlines and structure (e.g. using a spider diagram). I’ve been trying Tinderbox for that, but I’m still undecided about whether to keep using it.

The second thing you need is good data back-up. My favourite back-up solution for the PC is Memeo’s AutoBackup. It is brain-dead simple. It backs up files as they change to any network storage system, including FTP sites. I was happy to discover that they now have a Mac version too, called LifeAgent. Check it out. It’s great. It has a feature called SmartPicks. This lets you just back-up documents, photos, music or whatever you want to back-up. I push all my files to a Buffalo network drive, which also backs itself up to an attached USB drive.