Please don't go off on me on how I should know these things. I worked inbound Tech support for Gateway computers back at the turn of the millennium. I do already had a keen grasp on this concept. I actually kept a log of how many grown men broke down weeping after I told them that neither their "novel" was okay or Gateway was responsible for a hard drive crash.
To be fair, I got the antivirus2009 Trojan and in trying to clean it, my actual anti virus locked me out of windows. Thankfully I write most days using my pda smartphone and I back up EVERYTHING important. So I only lost about thirty five screen shots from IMVU, some mp3s of 'Dead Ringers' and spent the last two days while not at work formatting, reloading and patching.
No, Accidental Magic is not lost. Unlike some authors I have had words with on the tgfiction yahoo group, I keep my stuff backed up. I have not, however, had much time to actually work on it.
Chapter twenty, "Wires Crossed" is almost done though, a little tweak and you'll get to see it. This is near the end, just not as close as the previous chapter titles might lead you to believe.
Ally Kat
Comments
Lost is lost
Dear Allystra,
I have done the same in the start of my working with computers, and for many years I renamed the Format-file so that I needed some extra time to really had to think once again before hitting the catastrophic "ENTER" at this stadium. That has saved me this catastrophy. I have however lost about 20 GB when one of my harddisks suddenly died in December last year. This has however taught me to have backup on PHYSICAL different media. Almost all of the TG-stories that I had collected as those were backed up. But all orher files were lost. I and other more experienced geeks could not "bring hunp... the HD to live ..er again". So my advice for us all is to have the material on different computers or at least on two DIFFERENT harddisks on the same computer. Perhaps it would be advisable to burn CD-roms as soon as a story has been finished. With todays lower prices on the simple CD-R disks I think this would be possible for most of us.
To all our authors I send the warmest thanks for your excellent job.
Ginnie
GinnieG
I learned the hard way that
I learned the hard way that even automatic backups to a different computer won't always help.
I once discovered that the drive on on computer (fortunately the secondary system) had had some sort of "soft" failure. Some files were badly garbled but still readable. So I'd been making backups of bad files....
Best bet is removable drives and have at least two of them an alternate between them for backups.
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
There's safety in the cloud...
You've now listed why I have moved to cloud based backup. Tools like Mozy and Carbonite provide close to real-time backup to secure encrypted internet storage. The last time I had catostrophic computer failure (the blue smoke came out) and total hard disk loss, it was essentially painless, because all my files were safe "out there."
It's not free, but it's pretty cheap.
FORMAT C: /S /U
FDISK is even funner. ;-)
Hi Ally
Backing up covers a multitude of sins (or slipped fingers.) You have my congratulations. It's a simple thing that saves a multitude of headaches -- and allows us to keep our hair instead of pulling it out.
If I had a faster internet connection, I would periodically make passworded .zip files of my \projects and \author directories and load them up to one of those internet sites that allow you to store your stuff. As it is, my stuff is stored on multiple computers, plus a thumb drive.
It's nice to hear a tale of woe that ends with "It's a good thing I back things up" instead of "I just lost months of work and my entire novel that was going to make me millions."
Ray Drouillard
Reformated Hard Drive?
Does not mean lost data... IF you're willing to spend enough to recover it. There are companies out there that recover data from severly crashed drives or reformatted drives. Supposedly, if you're despirate enough, you can even recover it after something else has been written to the same spot on the drive. Not easy mind you... But possible.
But, if you've not written much to the drive as yet, it's likely that one of the good data recovery houses (or some good hacker) can recover most, if not all of your data (like your tax returns from 5 years ago, etc.)
Annette
Re: Reformated Hard Drive?
There is plenty of s/w available, some free, some you have to pay for, that will recover data from a hard drive and can be used by 'normal' PC users, you don't need to be a 'hacker' to be able to recover 'lost' data!
Nor do you need to pay companies a lot of money to do it for you, not unless your hard drive is so badly damaged that you can't access it at all.
A couple of utilities that come to mind are, Active Partition Recovery and Active File Recovery, both from Active Data Recovery Services (a registered name of LSoft Technologies Inc.).
Regards,
Dave.
Formatting Computers
We played a cruel, but deserved, joke on an arrogant friend of a friend. He always had 'the best' of everything, including computers and associated software. He was very proud of collection of games. This was more than ten years ago. We were visiting and asked if we could play some games. He was a bit wary as he wasn't sure we 'had the knowledge' to operate his fine machine. He left after making sure everything was booted up properly.
We waited about ten minutes and then approached him with long faces.
"There seems to be a problem with the computer."
That got his attention. "What wrong."
"Well we were trying to get another game to come up and after pressing some keys we got a screen that said ' Do you wish to format Drive 'C' now.' We thought that was part of the game, so we clicked on 'yes'. Now it's just sitting there with that little thingy blinking at us and the computer won't do anything."
Well, he about had a heart attack and literally dropped some cooking utensiles as he raced to see how we had destroyed his computer. The look on his face was priceless. Most everyone else was in on the joke.
Well he is still a biggoted homophobe and can't even consider being transgendered as anything but being sick. It was fun taking him down a notch that day and we still laugh about it.
Portia
Portia
Cruel joke
If all you said is true, does your joke make you any better than them? I think not and I wouldn't be bragging about this.
I was the target of a great many cruel jokes when growing up. Or have so called friends stand by and watch when you're getting beat up on by 3-5 kids just because your baseball went in the yard. Maybe they thought I deserved it too.
Einstein described insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the result to change. Was Albert a reader of TG fiction then?
Daniel, author of maid, whore, bimbo, and sissy free TG fiction since 2000
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.- Oscar Levant
you didnt deserve it
you didnt deserve it and she wasnt talking about any physical violence. no one was hurt. there was a little embarrassment and the arrogant friend of theirs feared they were so dumb that they had reformatted his harddrive lol. i think its funny also.
I had to reformat my drive 3 times this year :( well last year lol.
first time, i dont know what had happened. i moved my computer to another room in the house and for some reason, i couldnt get it to boot up so i had to reinstall windows. THe second time, i was trying out some security software that encrypted the drive and i had to use a password to boot it. i forgot it and had to reformat the drive again. DUHHH. i cant remember what happened the last time. im just lucky im smart enough to keep all of the esensual files on a 4 gig usb flash drive. i would have lost years of work then
I recall a joke being turned...
Back on it's initiator back in the late '80s...
This was the DOS days... One co-worker (known for practical jokes - *sighs*) added a little routine to his startup scripts. The effect was to effectively turn the display upside down - literally. The point at the "top" of the letter "A" pointed down and the "V" pointed up. So, the screen would work normally, but rotated by 180 degrees.
The gagg'ed coworker came in. He was in a bit of a hurry. He COULD have fixed the problem, but it was easier to just pick up the 12 inch amber monitor and turn it over. He did this, and fixed his document and left.
The prankster almost blew a gasket waiting for the explosion that didn't happen. :-)
Annette
Jokes
When I was in college (when MS DOS was relatively new, and Windoze 1.0 was a really recent invention,) I was a student tutor and lab proctor. I was always reminding people to log off when they left. Still, I would find a terminal logged in fairly often.
I used to send them mail from their own account telling them that their account was at risk if they remained logged on. That was somewhat amusing, but lacked that certain kick.
One day, I wrote a program that exactly mimicked the Vax terminal's display when every file in the account was being deleted. That involved piping a DIR command to a file, and reading that file (I forgot if I used Basic or Fortran) and sending the appropriate stuff to the terminal. The program did some other things, too.
After that, whenever I found a terminal logged on, I would edit the equivalent of DOS's autoexec.bat so that it would run my program (which I kindly copied to their account.)
When they logged on, they would see a large message that said, This account will self-destruct in ten seconds.
It would then count down to zero and print "BOOM! Then, it would run the phony account deletion code.
After that, it would say "April Fools! (and it's not even April yet.)
Then, it would delete my program and either delete the autoexec.bat equivalent or restore the old one. All evidence would disappear and nobody would be able to reproduce the problem.
Yes, I know that it technically constituted misuse of my position.
Ray Drouillard