Harddrive Crashes Suck!!!
Some of you from Fanfiction.net may have noted our skipped update last week and we explained when we finally posted the new chapter that our haddrive had crashed.
It has been an inconvenient, frustrating experience. To the extreme.
Years ago, when we were in college, we used Windows. Our first laptop was a factory refurbished Gateway that worked steadily at everything we threw at it, minus the fact that the power port needed replacing every year. (Yes, you read that right, EVERY flipping year... which we learned AFTER the warranty ran out...) But for all that it worked in theory, we backed up files monthly like it was a religious obligation because we did have complete meltdowns with the laptop once in a while. Including corrupted files (lost forty pages of a file that you could see parts of and the rest was gibberish), etc.
When we graduated, we said enough was enough, and after much shopping around, careful comparisons, we decided that we'd had enough of Windows. After all, both of us had Bachelors in Computer Science, we know how buggy Windows can be (and how easily hacked) etc, etc. When you live and breath technology for a while, with other knowledgeable people, you get to know all the kinks. Windows has kinks and them some.
So we said forget it. We converted to a Mac. They say when you switch to a Mac, you never go Back, and we found this true. We have loved our Macs over the decade since and have never had a problem with them. No hardware meltdowns, no program corruptions, everything has worked beautifully. To the point that we started to get lazy. We only backed up files once a year, when we pulled out our USB harddrive to pull out Christmas music for the season, and decided it was time to back up as well.
So when we look at the harddrive crash we had (completely unexpected, no signs it was coming), we haven't backed up things en masse since last November. NOVEMBER.
One can see how we might be a little irritated at the loss.
Ignoring how we've been unplugged for a week (which is why we hadn't posted here or the chapter at ff.net, etc), and the difficulty of trying to figure out just how much has been lost etc, it's just been a giant pain.
Now that we have our freshly fixed laptop back, the scale of how much we've lost is slapping us in the face.
On a whole, we when start up with a new laptop or system, we usually spend about two days in customization. Finding all those buried preferences and tweaking them to be safer, downloading programs like Firefox or Opera or OpenOffice, bringing over music and videos, etc. This while tedious, is not really bad. But as we were doing this, we met up with how much we've lost. Thankfully, a lot of things like, oh I don't know, our entire novelization of Assassins Creed Brotherhood, has all been sent out via email to betas. So digging through email saved it, even if the original files are gone. The RESEARCH that went with the novelization, completely gone. It has to be done again. And that was a lot of research. Puff, gone.
We have also, like at the beginning of the summer, realized that there's this thing called bronies that we like. Granted, we've always liked MLP:FiM, but we didn't realize there was a whole craze on the internet and that a lot of bronies have made some very good and diverse music. So over the course of the summer we've been downloading songs. That's all gone. I've just spent the past two days digging around to find the artists we've been grabbing songs for and just when it seems I'm almost done, I remember ANOTHER artist that I need to look up because we grabbed a bunch of music from them. To say nothing of finding the place where I actually downloaded the canon music.
But all of this isn't the worst. Oh no. The worst thing we've lost is Image's art. Most of the pieces are up at deviant art, but not the actual photoshop files. And it's the photoshop files that are important with all the layers. If Image ever wants to go back and redo a piece, she'll need those files and they no longer are in this plane of existence.
Head, meet wall. Lesson learned, backups are back to being religious because even so awesome a system as a Mac can stumble.
It has been an inconvenient, frustrating experience. To the extreme.
Years ago, when we were in college, we used Windows. Our first laptop was a factory refurbished Gateway that worked steadily at everything we threw at it, minus the fact that the power port needed replacing every year. (Yes, you read that right, EVERY flipping year... which we learned AFTER the warranty ran out...) But for all that it worked in theory, we backed up files monthly like it was a religious obligation because we did have complete meltdowns with the laptop once in a while. Including corrupted files (lost forty pages of a file that you could see parts of and the rest was gibberish), etc.
When we graduated, we said enough was enough, and after much shopping around, careful comparisons, we decided that we'd had enough of Windows. After all, both of us had Bachelors in Computer Science, we know how buggy Windows can be (and how easily hacked) etc, etc. When you live and breath technology for a while, with other knowledgeable people, you get to know all the kinks. Windows has kinks and them some.
So we said forget it. We converted to a Mac. They say when you switch to a Mac, you never go Back, and we found this true. We have loved our Macs over the decade since and have never had a problem with them. No hardware meltdowns, no program corruptions, everything has worked beautifully. To the point that we started to get lazy. We only backed up files once a year, when we pulled out our USB harddrive to pull out Christmas music for the season, and decided it was time to back up as well.
So when we look at the harddrive crash we had (completely unexpected, no signs it was coming), we haven't backed up things en masse since last November. NOVEMBER.
One can see how we might be a little irritated at the loss.
Ignoring how we've been unplugged for a week (which is why we hadn't posted here or the chapter at ff.net, etc), and the difficulty of trying to figure out just how much has been lost etc, it's just been a giant pain.
Now that we have our freshly fixed laptop back, the scale of how much we've lost is slapping us in the face.
On a whole, we when start up with a new laptop or system, we usually spend about two days in customization. Finding all those buried preferences and tweaking them to be safer, downloading programs like Firefox or Opera or OpenOffice, bringing over music and videos, etc. This while tedious, is not really bad. But as we were doing this, we met up with how much we've lost. Thankfully, a lot of things like, oh I don't know, our entire novelization of Assassins Creed Brotherhood, has all been sent out via email to betas. So digging through email saved it, even if the original files are gone. The RESEARCH that went with the novelization, completely gone. It has to be done again. And that was a lot of research. Puff, gone.
We have also, like at the beginning of the summer, realized that there's this thing called bronies that we like. Granted, we've always liked MLP:FiM, but we didn't realize there was a whole craze on the internet and that a lot of bronies have made some very good and diverse music. So over the course of the summer we've been downloading songs. That's all gone. I've just spent the past two days digging around to find the artists we've been grabbing songs for and just when it seems I'm almost done, I remember ANOTHER artist that I need to look up because we grabbed a bunch of music from them. To say nothing of finding the place where I actually downloaded the canon music.
But all of this isn't the worst. Oh no. The worst thing we've lost is Image's art. Most of the pieces are up at deviant art, but not the actual photoshop files. And it's the photoshop files that are important with all the layers. If Image ever wants to go back and redo a piece, she'll need those files and they no longer are in this plane of existence.
Head, meet wall. Lesson learned, backups are back to being religious because even so awesome a system as a Mac can stumble.