Don't Just Publish - Keep Your Writing Safe on Vocal
Back it UP!
Sharing what you write on Vocal is an easy and fun way to express your creativity. If you paid for a Vocal+ membership, you can enter their contests, known as “challenges.” Anyone can use the prompts in the challenges to work on their writing muscles, even if they're not entering. A supportive writing community exists on Vocal, and many Creators run their own unofficial challenges, adding to the camaraderie.
It is not optimal to rely on Vocal as your primary storage or backup solution. Vocal is a public publishing platform and not designed as a safeguard for your documents. Sure, they are stored there, but dedicated services like Google Drive or Dropbox can safeguard them.
No matter your genre—poetry, essays, fiction, or non-fiction—always create and save your documents using reliable software such as Word or Google Docs. Keep copies on your computer and regularly back them up to an external drive or secure cloud storage. After investing so much effort, don’t risk losing your work to hardware failure or website issues. 🖥️╶🔳🟢
Personally, I write my stories in Word before transferring them to Vocal. After pasting the text, I make any necessary formatting adjustments, since features like italics and bold don’t always transfer. On the occasions I wrote directly on Vocal, I encountered problems—sometimes entire paragraphs vanished during editing. By keeping an offline copy, you can easily restore lost content. If your browser crashes or the Vocal site becomes unstable, your work remains safe. Writing offline also provides better editing tools, such as spell-check and grammar suggestions. Using a simple plain-text editor can help minimize formatting issues prior to moving your work online.
Even large, well-known companies can disappear or have their business models restructured — think of Montgomery Ward (now only online instead of brick-and-mortar), K-Mart, or Sears (most stores closed, and both are barely visible now). If you don’t keep personal backups of your work and Vocal ever shuts down, you risk losing all your writing.
Finally, always remember to SAVE your work frequently as you write or edit in Vocal. Save often, review your draft for errors—especially if you use voice-to-text—and make necessary corrections before publishing.
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Copyright © 3/2/2026 by Andrea O. Corwin
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About the Creator
Andrea Corwin
🐘Wildlife 🧘♀️ 🖋️🈷️ 3rd°🥋 See nature through my eyes and photos.
Poetry, haiku, fiction, horror, life experiences. Written without A.I. © Andrea O. Corwin
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Comments (8)
I completely agree with you. It’s never wise to rely on any single platform as a primary storage solution for our work. About a month ago, my Medium account was suddenly terminated due to certain allegations, and it was permanently suspended. I had spent years building that account, publishing hundreds of posts. In a moment, all of it disappeared. Years of effort, consistency, and momentum were gone. When you’ve worked hard to build something and finally start gaining traction, losing everything overnight is incredibly discouraging. That experience taught me a hard lesson. Now, no matter what I write or where I publish, I make sure to save multiple copies. I keep backups offline and in cloud storage so that if something unfortunate happens again, I at least have my work safe and under my control. I’ve created a new account and I’m trying to start again, but it’s not easy. When you lose your previous presence and impact, rebuilding feels overwhelming. Still, this time I’m being more careful. Your reminder about backing up our writing is extremely important, especially for writers who may not realize how vulnerable online platforms can be. Thank you for sharing this advice. It truly matters.
Good advice, and I always do this, as the Vocal platform, whilst being the best for publishing, still has many system issues that they completely ignore, and that is worrying
Sage advice, Andrea. I back up everything to separate files and keep backups of those. I also agree that italic and bold fonts, and some emojis, do not transfer well onto Vocal.
Excellent reminder, Andi. I always write my fiction in Word. But with short pieces like haiku and journal notes I type directly into Vocal. Learned my lesson recently by losing a story about the ballet performance I attended in Tbilisi. So will back up everything now.
This is such good advice. A backup...and then a backup for that! I always make sure I've got my work in three spots at least. It's saved me so many times!
Absolutely. Vocal is not word processing software:; expecting it to perform as such is user-entry failure. I agree 100%z
This is sage counsel, Andrea--thanks for the practical tips!
I too always write on Word and then I copy paste to Vocal. But that's for stories and articles. For poems, I write them on my Notes app on my phone and them copy paste to Vocal hehehe. It's always good to have backup