minimal damage

[ritaxis]

So this morning as I was doing my word count the computer froze. It was not the first time. But this time letting it sit didn't help: I couldn't turn it off: so I just closed the lid and went and did other things for a few hours.

When I came back the computer had not gone into sleep mode. It was hot to the touch, which I had not noticed before. This time I followed janetmk's directions for getting it to shut down -- leaning on the power button for several seconds until it gave in and shut down. Again I went away for a few hours. I came back and tried to turn the computer on. The computer noodled around for a while and then told me it couldn't turn itself on and would I allow it to go back to some mythical system restore point -- which would have been back when it was still Frank's. Not desirable though the computer promised not to change any of my personal data. I said no and it went through a recovery process that felt long but wasn't really. I called up my files.

I only lost a few hundred words. Just the tying-up bits at the end of the chapter. It could have been so much worse. Anyway, the chapter stands at 4100+ words, which together with the other chapter means I'm a bit below 15000 words -- maybe 14 or 14.5 K.

Next task: offsite backup. After that: rewrite the last bit of the chapter and on to chapter 4, in which our little prince is mistaken for a serving boy, which is not nearly as bad as being taken for a prince.

On another front, I got the dog's medicine on time again. And also paid the flood insurance.

edit: googledocs is accomplished and I have tested it and it works okay! I am backed up. Now to sleep or I won't be able to write tomorrow.

I guess i I save it to googedocs each day I can stop worrying about the laptop.

Comments

[ellarien]

Relief!

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Actually, I prefer Dropbox to Googledocs...just sayin'.

That said, I'd better do backups today.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Excellent news on the writing recovery front!

Googledocs should be fine. Pamela emails herself on gmail with copies of things. Dropbox is good. For small chunks of backup (and anything written by one person is "small" in computer data terms) there are lots and lots of perfectly good ways to save a copy.

The one thing that worries me about Googledocs, which I don't use myself -- does it do a format conversion? Because if it does, that means there's always at least some chance of it messing up the one time it matters. I do favor backup schemes that just store the file as-is.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Backup early and often! Murphy is out to get you!

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

You can uncheck the conversion box! This was a great relief to me. Also, you can upload a whole folder at once if you either use chrome or you install a one-time-only applet. I don't know why it's one-time-only, but they did say you'd have to install the applet every time you wanted to upload a folder.

I am saving everything I write on the laptop in .rtf because the laptop has Open Office and the desktop has Word Perfect and I prefer Word Perfect in general but I'm not going to go to the trouble of installing because the difference is too small to worry about: and although supposedly .doc and .wpd files can be easily converted one to the other, there's always weirdnesses when you do, and everybody can handle .rtf.

[momomom.livejournal.com]

What good news!