I am enraged, mad as Hell, furious and somewhat put out! Trouble is I don't know who to be mad at.
This morning at the crack of dawn I spent ages formatting episode 52 of volume 3 - Footprints in the Sea. I had it all set on the Big Closet fomatting and editing page and went through it doing the double spacing and graphics and once satisfied I scrolled down, edited it and then with a shout of triumph ~I scrolled down again to hit the save button.....No I didn't because the puter froze, (it's done if before, numerous times) but this time I had lost two or three hours of tedious bloody work because when I switched everything off and restarted all my work had vanished from the BC page.
I don't know whether it's a Windows 10 problem, Microsoft Word 10 or its a fault of Lenovo's, (the make of the computer).
I am buying a new computer within the year and I'll definately try Apple-Mac for the system and go back to Hewlitt Packard for the machine.
Fortunately I am a save freak and not only back up on a flash drive but Norton and Word save to the cloud for me but nonetheless it's pretty maddening if I lose written work I did in between back-ups.
Other than that, it's been a lovely day.
Frances
Comments
I've had that happen
it's frustrating as hell. Although what I do now is do all my formatting and prep work in MS word then copy and paste it into BC.
What made word my choice was the ability to create macros. All the html tags I use that are in the BC editor, I created macros for in word that way inserting them is as easy as tapping the hot key I associated it to.
So now if BC stalls, the web pages crashes on my PC or I lose internet connection, I don't lose the work
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
I can feel your pain
There are times when I lose some changes to my data despite me pretty anal about backups.
I've been sorting out a pile (around 3ft high) of old Hard disks that range in size from 120Mb to 1Tb and either ATA or SATA interfaces.
There are copies of pretty well all my work (work work not writing) going back to 1999 and many copies to boot.
All my worthwhile data is now on a pair of 4TB HDD's and I'm almost done security erasing all the redundant disks prior to taking them to the recycling centre.
I've had exactly the same thing as you happen with submissions but thankfully, my Mac has not frozen when I've had a glitch with data that I'm about to post.
To avoid it, this is what I do.
I paste my story into the BC edit box from a Word Dcoument.
Then like you, I do all the BC specific formatting.
BEFORE I hit preview, I CTRL-A/CTRL-C on the edit box to take a copy of the edited text.
Then and again before I hit Preview, I save the BC formatted text into a new word document and make sure it is saved onto disk.
Then and onlt then do I hit PReview and continue with the sumbission process. That way I never lose the BC formatted text (famous last words and all that permitting)
Samantha.
Emotions do influence computers.
You need to be calm and composed, opposed to angry or excited, when around a computer. It happens almost daily for me. When I try to write an angry response to someone 99% my computer finds a way to dump my angry response... Same text same punctuation written calmly and composedly? Computer allows it even when I call a-hole an a-hole...
And... Tere is no God as in "kindly older guy with white beard", but there are some kind of higher forces having fun looking at us. Recently I was like thousand miles from home. And after leaving my car correctly parked for about 5 minutes... What do I find? Another car from my city 1000 miles away parked in my cars bumper... Another funny thing is that after unparking another car from my bumper we were unable to find any scratch worth tainting our carma with insurance companies.
Of course, you could do what I did
I loaded a flavor of Linux on my laptop because Windows was driving me nuts. Took me a while to adjust to Libre Office instead of using Word, but it worked.
And, it was for free!
Back to the drudgery of summer. Why I do spring cleaning during the hottest time of the year I will never know.
Be back with more stories to tell come the fall and apple cider time.
AuP
Agreed.
Switching to Libre solutions for all your productivity needs will cause a drastic hit to your productivity for a short time while you relearn to do things slightly differently because, different software, but long-term, you'll actually become more productive. There are things, for example, that LibreOffice can do built-in that MS Office cannot without third party extension. The only reason to use Windows is quickly becoming a slightly-less-locked-down gaming console. As long as you only play games on it, Windows tends to behave itself... But try to do any productivity on it and it's a nightmare.
Oh, and the direction MS seems to be going with pushing their Windows Store so hard, there'll likely be a convergence between the Xbox and any Windows PC very soon. Xbox will basically just be a slightly less powerful Windows box built to MS controlled specifications.
Abigail Drew.
Been there
done that. I used to write Bike direct to site, until I lost a few episodes when the link went down. I save everything to a flash memory.
Angharad
How long had it been since last boot?
I ask because it could be pertinent information with Windows 10. AFAIK there's still an outstanding "bug" in the entire 8-10 series of Windows wherein some idiot programmer at MS decided to do a rewrite of a very important OS process control feature... And the idiot forgot to make it threaded. So basically, at some point in the process control process, all processes are forced to query this service that runs on only one thread, which causes a massive bottleneck and can lead to visible hitching of the interface at it's most mild, and, given long enough between full cold boots from full off, locking up entirely at its worst.
Abigail Drew.