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The Mystery of the Missing Chunk
Please, please, please BACK UP your work! I've lost a relatively large chunk of a story due in TWO days...AGGGHHH!! Read on, and may my horror and frustrations potentially save some of your future work:
http://stevenchapmanwriter.com/mystery-missing-chunkSAVE, SAVE, SAVE! Duplicate files, save 'em of different computers, email drafts to yourself...do NOT lose all that hard work you put into your stories...especially if someone else is waiting on said story :S
Comments
I feel your pain and despair, after my memory stick disaster.
I temporarily lost everything when my last laptop crashed. Months later I switched it on, on a whim, and it miraculously booted up. The first thing I did was copy everything to an external hard drive!
Wish I could say the same for the photos I seem to have permanently lost due to crap CD's.
I have numerous copies of my novel in odd places, but I should keep them all up to date.
Thanks for the reminder. I haven't saved the Windows version at all, except to documents - will do it now to the flash drive.
I feel your pain.
Good job you're a darn creative so and so, and will be able to produce another marvellous marvel in two (or more) shakes of a lamb's tail.
My hard drive actually did fail a little while ago, on my 8 year old computer, but using a special technique you can do on a mac, you can connect a 'good' mac to the failed one, and even if you can't open the HD of the mac at all on the failed one, the hard drive opens on the new computer and you can 'see' everything in it using something called Target. I just dragged everything onto the new computer. Even the applications came, so things like photoshop etc i still have and no need to re-download them or anything. Very convenient, What I was working on at the time of the fail was all there. I didn't have that computer backed up to an external hard drive.
But apart from that, now, have my mac backed up to an external hard drive and everything including the operating system and applications are all on that so if it happens again, all i need to do is plug the HD into another computer and carry on until the computer I'm using has been mended.
But as I say, I have set Word to back up every 2 minutes and it backs up.
I have multiple flash drives which I update when I create or edit or add to a Word document. Also one for photos.
I also have hard copies of my novels and of some short stories, though not all.
Bill - when you email attachments to yourself of an updated work, so you then delete the previous version? If I'm working on a novel I change something every day and would end up with dozens of versions - most confusing!
This is why all my solo and the masshoosiveness that is all the Towton writing is backed up on an external drive and on google drive and a few really important ones on memory stick, hard copy and email attachments.
As for harddrives, we've had many fail for various reason before but my brother has managed to retrieve everything via some (odd) techniques picked up from his job.
One harddrive spent time in the freezer due to this.
Or a few bodies.
But you should only put the harddrive in there (if it's failed and needs to be cooled down to hook up to a new machine so you can get data off in batches that is)... I'm not sure what would happen to the whole machine if you put it in. Give it frostbyte?
*gets coat*
It will turn into i screen!!
http://stevenchapmanwriter.com/case-closed
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