Checking in: a number of things

[cleolinda]

You haven't heard from me much because I have been really, deeply, severely depressed for the last couple of weeks. I tried to write up a huge entry describing what it feels like, and then... I got too depressed to post it. Maybe I'll polish it up and post it later, because I think it might be valuable for 1) people who might recognize themselves

Comments

[laurelin_kit]

If it makes you feel any better I've had my ghetto-ass external (just a hard drive in an external CASE, not even one of the new fancy ones) for like three years and I've never had a problem with it, and I abuse it more than I should. Also. GMAIL. I email myself every paper I write for classes. You could even set up a separate account just to email your notes to.

[channonyarrow]

Ditto the gmail, or look into something like box.net or dropbox as storage. I have a couple of websites where I dump important stuff into non-publicly-accessible folders, but that might not work for you - I don't recall you ever linking us to your own website, for example. But get your data into the cloud, keep local copies, and there you go. Even if one fails, the other isn't likely to fail at the same time.

(Having said that, now a lightning strike will take out both your external drive and all of Google's servers. Sorry about that.)

[quorothorn]

Yeah, I've used the "e-mail to yourself" trick for college papers running on several years now (albeit not with Gmail). Works beautifully. Of course, now I won't need it for that purpose ever again, so...yeah.

Meanwhile, my backup hard drive died for no apparent reason a while ago, and two of my three new-bought memory sticks no longer work. So if my laptop were to finally succumb after its long fight with some manner of electronic terminal disease...well. I won't lose my Word documents, because they're small enough to all fit on another memory stick that is actually historically reliable, but most of the bigger documents have no chance. I've essentially given up my RealPlayer library (of like 1,300 files, naturally) for dead and stopped worrying about it.

The gist of the matter is that I don't quite trust these sort of devices anymore.

[clodia_risa]

Months of research from my husband's dissertation was saved because of Gmail when the idiot techs decided to reformat the buggy hard drive on the lab computer without backing it up. Fortunately, my husband emailed the new spreadsheets and data etc. approximately every week to his professor (who was in another state at the time) so he didn't lose several years worth of research.

[clodia_risa]

*The first word (months) should have been years.