Archive for ‘losing files’

July 11th, 2011

Crying Over Spilled Milk

by Holly Dodson

Or lost words, as it were.

So between Thursday afternoon and Friday afternoon of last week I wrote about 5k words as a restart for my wip.  A much stronger, much more exciting beginning to the story that has been plaguing me.  (Which, up to now I’d only been adding 200-500 words at a time, so this was a huge breakthrough.)

Imagine my surprise when I went to continue the story Friday night and my jump drive was dead.

Many tears, and a trip to the computer store later, nothing can be retrieved.

Now, I’m a big fan of backup copies of everything — so almost everything on there was backed up.  Except my latest revisions I’ve been working on and, you guessed it, that brand new 5k words.

It’s not as bad as it could have been, but it still sucks.  So instead of adding to the story eating at my brain this weekend, I rewrote about 3k of it.

Think of this as your friendly reminder to back your files up.  I’ve switched my backup service over to SugarSync, which can detect when I make changes to a document, and will back it up as soon as I hit save.  Yeah, Holly’s not losing any more work.

Categorybad day, losing files, Writing | CommentNo Comments »

June 1st, 2010

Tipsy Tuesday- Computer Woes

by Holly Dodson

Well, seeing as I experienced the writer’s worst nightmare this weekend, I thought I’d share some resources to help make it not so nightmareish.
There are a couple places I’ve found that will store up to 2GB of files for FREE:

Dropbox

Mozy

They also both offer upgrades for larger storage space at pretty low rates. I use Dropbox…I didn’t know about Mozy until I started compiling this list, but it looks just as good.

Carbonite was recommended by a commenter on Saturday. It offers unlimited backup capacity for $50 a year. That’s probably a better deal than both Dropbox and Mozy if you have a lot of files to save.

Geek Squad also offers online backup- 25G for $50 a year. Again, Carbonite is the better option if you have more than 25G.

So, even if you only back up your novel files and the most important pictures — please, please, please do. You just never know when Mr. Murphy will visit you for a day!

Are there any other good places out there to back things up that I missed? Grated, this isn’t an all-inclusive list.

Categoryediting, links, losing files, tips, Writing | Comment4 Comments »

May 29th, 2010

The importance of backing up your work…

by Holly Dodson

What a freaking day.

Super-Spawn was up at six this morning and I thought, “Hey, I could get some writing done.” Tralalala, right? Yeah, until I went to turn my computer on.

And it didn’t turn on.

Crap.

I called tech support and they told me to take it to Geek Squad. My computer is only a few months old…it really shouldn’t have died. Plus it was working fine last night. So I took it to the store, oh but they don’t open until ten.

Fine. We’ll go to the book store.

Aaaaaand, they’re having power problems and are closed.

ARGH!!!

We waste time in Target and return to the computer place, finally. Oh, but they can’t fix my computer without my receipt. No, they couldn’t look my receipt up either because I paid cash for the computer.

It gets better.

Super-Spawn was acting like he was the spawn of Arch Nemesis as he screamed and attempted to squirm his way out of the stroller. So we high tailed it to the car — I called the tech people back and have to ship my computer to them to be fixed. At my expense. Even though it is still under Warranty.

Yeah, not happy at all.

We went about our day, lunch and a movie with friends. When the movie was out I thought, “Oh, let’s go to the book store across town. I need another book to read and Super-Spawn want’s a Three Musketeers book. Cool. This day will get better.”

Sigh. If only.

On the way to the book store my tire blew out.

Luckily friends were following us and helped change the tire and get air in the spare.

Oh, and did I mention I’m losing ALL my files off my computer when they repair it? Yeah, ALL. Luckily my novels and most pictures are backed up. I will lose the work I did on editing last night, but that’s just a few hours and at least not months worth of sweat and tears.

Still. I cried my little eyes out. What a freaking day! The lesson?

ALWAYS BACK YOUR FILES UP!!!! And have great friends willing to help change a tire in the humid Florida heat.

Forgive me if I grumble about being computer-less for a while. It’s gonna suck.

Categorybad day, losing files, parenting, Writing | Comment5 Comments »