Close calls

Luckily, I haven't had one. Now my laptop is backed up to an external hard drive and I use google docs for writing.

That reminds me, I haven't swapped filed throughout my other computers lately.

Updating...

Lidiya said:

A few minutes ago I took my memory stick, and happily tried to shove it in those USB ports in my laptop. It wouldn't go in. AT ALL.

After a close look, I realised a SUNFLOWER seed had got stuck inside the damn thing.

My novels, flash fiction, pictures, MY LIFE was on the line.

Fortunately, my grandma helped me pry the stupid thing out with a needle. Phew.

What's the closest call you've had?

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No, Lidiya - no! You can't just say there was a sunflower seed in the USB port. How on earth did it get there? Sabotage? I think there's a definite short story there - possibly an entire spy novel!

Once a week, I sync everything to SkyDrive in a new folder. If I have a burst of writing, I sync it after that.

As for close calls, had the motherboard on my laptop go out. I was sweating it until I got my drive hooked to another machine and my docs backed up. After that, I found Backup Religion(TM), because Jesus saves.

The mains connection on my laptop died recently. I had only the remaining duration of the battery life (18 minutes) to transfer all my WIP's, notes and so forth onto a memory stick. It was this huge, dramatic race against time.

Now, I email everything to myself, and back up my memory stick every single time I update.

Also, how did a sunflower seed get in your USB drive? You don't have computer squirrels, do you?

Shortly before I learned to back up my files, my computer decided it wanted to have a heart attack. Right in the middle of a rare occasion of writing bliss, up popped that dreaded blue screen.

I nearly died.

I spent the next several hours in a panic, sobbing and muttering nonsense while my poor husband tried to fix the darned thing so I'd shut up and he could go back to sleep. xD Although he wasn't able to fix it that night, my uncle (who fortunately knows a little more about computers than we do) was able to get it up and running again the next morning.

First thing I did after that was copy the entire contents of my computer to a flash drive. Now, whether I write a few words or entire paragraphs, I copy that sucker over.

So yeah...lesson learned.

Lidiya said:

Google Docs, gotta start using that.

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I am in love with it. So easy and convenient!!!

I need to go out today and figure out how I am backing everything up - that's pretty important stuff!

I dropped my laptop down the stairs once. The guys in the shop were able to put it back together, but there were some bits left over that I never did figure out.

I e-mail my files to myself every time I've made some progress, so that it's backed up on the GMail cloud. And then I sometimes Dropbox it just to be safe (though that's just recently been hacked, urgh).

thumb drive through the washer and dryer.....that still opened all my work and writing files

My laptop crashed and took 10,000 words of un-backed-up work with it once.

I now back up everything in three places, including dropbox.

In terms of close calls, I once dropped the laptop (same one, after the crashing incident) and it just missed landing on the stone floor - I caught it, wrenching my shoulder in the process.

I seriously use about three USB sticks to save on after a washing machine incidient.

Note: washing machine vs USB stick - I think we know who is gonna win.

This thread makes my blood run cold.

My motto as regards backing up files? PARANOIA IS GOOD.

In 1989 I interviewed a programmer at Bell Labs in NJ for a magazine article. He was the inventor of C++, and the topic was hot. The magazine was to pay my expenses and a fee for the article on delivery.

I used a cassette recorder to capture the interview. When I got home to Florida, I couldn't find the tape to transcribe the interview. I called him, and he said I'd left it on his desk. He sent it to me, and all was well.

Huge lesson learned.

Dropbox -- gotta love dropbox. Does it all automatically and save my life loads of times.

Kids, can't drop them in a dox when they come and hug the laptop with fizzy pop.

The worst I've had is when I reformatted my comp and backed up everything EXCEPT my WIP, which was at 87k at that point. Luckily I had a PDF on mediafire I'd uploaded a week or so before for a friend/beta.

The conversion back to my original format was not very fun.

Someone hacked your dropbox? Did they do something screwy with your stuff in there?

I can just see myself opening my WIP and thinking, MAN I sucked last time I wrote... what the hell IS that while thiefs on the other side of the country chuckle after having written in a long paragraph where my characters take up bestiality and watercolor painting.

I email my MS once a week to myself. One week, I made a typo in the domain and didn't notice until right as I hit send. I spent the next 20 minutes hyperventilating and thinking I had just emailed a random stranger a 47K manuscript.

Luckily, my email is smarter than I am and corrected the domain error. No random stranger reading my half-baked drivel.

But I was very, very upset for those 20 minutes.

Hard drive crash. Even though I had nearly complete backups, it still took a full month to completely recover. Now I use another computer as an additional backup.

I thought I could get through a bit of writer's block with the help of a glass of something interesting, which examination over the next couple of days revealed had turned into emptying the drinks cabinet and doing untold reprehensible things that will never be spoken of again. My hacked'n'slashed MS, yes, the main file, the un-backed up main file, the only copy I had, was open on my desktop, many thousand words shorter than I last remembered it being and with mysterious 'large amounts of text' on my clipboard. I clicked 'yes' when Word asked me if I wanted to save it and clear the clipboard when I closed it

Edit: not so much a close call as a will never do that again no matter what ;p