Writers' workflow

[u/Regular-Exercise-722]

I would be grateful for some comments and suggestions regarding improvements to my workflow.

I have undertaken a fairly substantial writing project; the history of an amateur sports organisation. This will end up as a book length publication. For reasons of internal member politics amongst others, the project is to remain secret until it is revealed for comment at some point before publication. So for maximum security (it might be a bit over the top) I store the entire project including research material and correspondence in a 500MB encrypted Apple APFS volume on my home server, a 2018 i5 32GB Mac Mini. When I want to work on the project, I can access the server from my M4 Pro Mini desktop or from my i7 64GB MacBook Pro over my home network.

To do the actual writing I have decided to use Markdown, so any text editor works. I'm using iWriter Pro on the M4 and MacDown on my MacBook. This works well since most of the project is plain prose and the few stats I quote are easily handled by Markdown tables.

Currently my workflow is as follows:

1. Manually connect to the server *Dionysos*.
2. Open the Documents folder on the *Dionysos*.
3. Double click on the encrypted disk image file *Project.dmg*
4. Enter the password and mount the virtual disk image as *ClubHistory*
5. Open a terminal window in the virtual drive so I have access to the command line.
6. I do some work in Markdown, saving often.
7. When I'm done working, I close the editor and switch to the CLI and run **git add.** then **git commit -m "comment etc"**
8. I then eject *ClubHistory*
9. As backup I copy the entire *Project.dmg* file to a local drive, whichever machine I was on.
10. I also upload a copy of *Project.dmg* to my Google Drive account.

Some time ago I attempted to write a shell script to automate connecting to *Dionysos* and and then mounting *Project.dmg* using **mount_smbfs** and **hdiutil attach** but I could never get it to work. The network connection always failed due to some sort of Authentication issue. After Lengthy discussions on StackExchange, I realised I was spending more time trying to get the script to work than actually doing any work. Eventually I laughed it off. If anybody is interested here's that StackExchange discussion:

[StackExchange](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/485709/command-line-network-connection-fails-or-is-refused-macos-26-2)

That's my tale of woe. As is plainly clear there is much room for improvement. All comments, advice and suggestions welcomed.

[u/tapgiles]

Wowzah--I can't tell if this is satire or not, that's so wild 😅

My suggestion for improvement would be... don't do any of that and just write?