Wednesday, March 15, 2006

A BAD DAY

Today I realised I had better back up the file I have been working on for the past 5 days - 10 000 words had built up when I hadn't been looking.

I pressed 'command' and 'save' as usual and then closed the file so I could convert to word. Then when I opened it again it had changed back to the file I had 5 days ago. All the changes I'd made gone. Hodmandod Senior came home from work early to try and find it, but it hadn't even been saved on the autosave.

Stupid computer.

The only thing I can do is try again. They were, of course, the best words I had ever written...or at least better rubbish than the rubbishy ones I first put down.

From now on I am backing up every sentence.

3 Comments:

Blogger Jonathan Wonham said...

Clare, I feel for you. I have a portable and recently my hard disk died. I lost everything that was on it that I hadn't backed up onto CD, which was mainly between months and years ago. Luckily, I print off my poems as I go along, but it's stilll a lot of lost work.

When I asked a computer Mr Fix-it, he told me that portable computers have hard disks with an average lifespan of about three years these days... Un believable! Mine was only two years old.

So, my advice: make a regular back up on an external memory device and print off what you write as you write it.

Wed Mar 15, 09:24:00 pm  
Blogger Jason Erik Lundberg said...

That totally sucks, Clare. Sorry to hear it. I hope you can reconstruct what you wrote.

Thu Mar 16, 03:06:00 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jonathan: Thank you for the warning about the hard disk - quite frightening. I am going to have to get myself into a system and somehow get methodical about this.

Jason: Thanks - nice to hear a sympathetic voice. I tried starting again last night - there were parts I knew I'd changed into something much better but couldn't remember at all what they were. Really sickening.

At least I realised late last night what had gone wrong. When I first opened the file in appleworks I did a spell check on it and it didn't like one of he Welsh names followed by a question mark and 'unexpectedly quit'.

What I should have done then was to restart the machine, apparently, but I didn't. I just opened the file again and carried on and on.

At least I've learnt a few things.

Thu Mar 16, 08:31:00 am  

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