noracharles | (no subject)

My netbook has finally died. Taking backups was so time consuming that I only made sure to back up my most vital files, so now I can't get at all the important but not vital things I had saved. It's a nuisance.

I also miss sitting in the morning sun while reading the news and checking my mail.

Maybe one of those harddisk readers would work? I'll have to ask in the computer store.

So! I now have a dropbox. I wonder why I never bothered to look at it when I first heard about it. Guess I assumed my regular backup methods were sufficient.

In the two years the netbook has been my primary computer, I've done okay. I had a recent backup of all my install files, and of my bookmarks, feeds and contacts, and of important documents of importance to real life. I don't have fanfic, art and vids I had saved to view off line. Most of it I will be able to find again, and what had been taken off the net by the creators I'm not too worried about.

For some strange reason, I never bothered to back up my own fic. I've been writing mostly for the harddisk for years, and had maybe two dozen fics in varying stages of completion. Finished fics I have "backed up" in that they are published, but works in progress I haven't. I feel a bit nostalgic for lost opportunities, but the reason they were works in progress is that I didn't have enough enthusiasm for the idea to finish them, or they were overly ambitious, or I didn't much like what I had written so far. In a way I feel off the hook.

What I miss more than the WIPs are my notes, because some of my story ideas had realistic potential and I have a memory like a sieve for things like that.

Threaded | Flat

You are taking it so well! Whenever technology fails around me (which is thankfully not often) I become a seething mass of anger and resentment.

I hope you find a way to recover all the things :o(

This will not solve your immediate problem, but I can't resist a pitch for Dropbox. Realtime automatic backup when you're connected to the internet; 2 gigs free. It saved my career, at least, when I was having computer issues. Various losses over the years mean that I use both Dropbox and Mozy, which is a nightly full-hard drive backup in the cloud, but Dropbox is definitely more value added.

I've had every computer I use--two laptops and two desktops--fail in the last year, one more than once, the latptops in the last few months. One laptop had Mozy, but I haven't tried to recover from that, yet--I forgot my password, as usual. All of my fic, except for the ones I have in archives, is gone, because my Geocities backups were on one of the laptops. But I do have a Dropbox which saved some really important documents, so I do love that.

Argh, poor you! Like calvinahobbes says, you're taking it much better than I would have. Do you have a desktop, or how are you communicating?

There are computer cables that can connect a drive to a USB port on another machine. There also needs to be a power cable to the drive.

Dad used his set to get things off my old laptop when it died.

Having also experienced a hard drive crash recently, I found that there was actually something refreshing about it.

(Another DropBox fan: they have clients for Mac, Linux, Windows, many phones).

Then again, my only creative works is inherently transitory (food) or highly tangible (jewelry).