I told you the ac adapter burned out last week.
I was using the alternate one, the oldest, pending the arrival of the new one from Dell.
It arrived. I waited until evening, when I like to use my computer in the living room, and plugged in there. Immediately—
The battery-charge light began blinking, two yellows and a green. This is not good. Not only that, all the programs I had running were no longer running, and the machine began showing me update notices and all sorts of crap, as if it were just booted. Ordinarily if there is an adapter problem, the computer will report it—no such thing. I didn’t like what was going on, however, and pulled the plug. The computer, which was already mostly charged, should have continued to run. It went black. No blinky shutdown lights. No. Just utterly black.
I took it back to my workstation, plugged in the other adapter, and tried to bring it up. Deader than a mackerel.
What’s on this hard drive? All my prepared work for Closed Circle, and the current Foreigner novel, which has not been backed up since 10,000 words ago.
Now, I will tell you, this is not a happy situation. Yes, I’ve got a backup at 80,000Â words. But a novel is a fragile thing. If I were knocked that far back in the process, I could not recover the book as it now exists. Things would change, and it would be a hard mental battle between what I envisioned being in the text and what I would find in the text. Reconstruction is an absolute nightmare.
I was reasonably calm. I asked Jane for her Dell, and tried to get online Chat. No luck. It was having a Moment and it was 7 pm. So I got the phone number and called Dell. I informed the screener that my computer had become a paperweight and after looking at my file, she routed my problem fairly quickly to a Latitude team, and a very nice chap with a Hispanic accent. He walked us through a procedure of removing the battery, then trying to come up on the old ac adapter.
Jane at that point noticed that the device was not showing a light, and it was humming.
So…we went and got the ac adapter that had started the problem. Plugged it in. Still nothing. By the tech’s instructions we stripped out the memory (half of it, not yet going after the chip under the keyboard, which is a bit of a bear to get at), the hard drive, and the dvd drive. Plugged in the adapter (the new one) and we had lights. Life. Joy!
We started adding pieces back, and the machine began to boot Windows. At that point, the tech very patiently waited while Jane—at this point my nerves were iffy and I was making keyboard mistakes—yanked the novel folder onto a flash drive. So we had that.
We got down to the last item, the main battery, and I was sure it would be fried, but no, it worked perfectly. The problem was not the new ac adapter, but the old one, which had decided to die when the UPS truck delivered the other one.
I had 3 glasses of wine after that, and have hell’s own headache this morning, but that’s all right. My file is backed up and my computer is alive.
😆 thank you for the sympathy. We do have a freestanding terabyte drive. We don’t use it often ENOUGH, unfortunately, and when I’m on a roll, I don’t think about backup…should. I’m going to look into mozy and carbonite, in the theory that if one of us in the household has it, we can shoot things to each other via network and get them backed up.
Dell, bless ’em—did I say the tech I got was one of the good guys?— asked if the ac adapter that caused the trouble was original with the computer. I said yes, and he’s sending me a new ac adapter to add to the one I bought.
Did I tell you how we think it played out? 3 pm, UPS delivers new adapter.
3 pm, my old adapter dies, leaving my laptop on battery, when I think it’s on the adapter.
5 pm, I unbox new adapter, go fetch computer, settle down to watch telly.
5:05 pm, my computer, on the new adapter, starts behaving hysterically, flashing yellow battery warning as I bring it up from sleep.
5:05:30 I freak and pull the adapter plug from the computer. Which hasn’t swallowed enough power to operate: becomes brick.
When we tested later and found the old adapter had died, we realized there was nearly a total correspondence between the demise of the old adapter and the arrival of the new, and between my computer totally running out of power just as I plug the new adapter in: so it behaved very oddly, having gotten fresh power mid-shutdown.
And just to frost the cake of weird coincidences the last 2 days—remember I lost my glasses? We’re out throwing mulch on things before the freeze comes, and I found my glasses lying on a part of the garden path where we rarely walk. One earpiece broke off and they slipped from my collar, and there they’ve been. I walk into the house—the phone rings—and it’s Costco. My new glasses just came in.
This is getting spooky. A writer hates coincidences. And they’ve been raining left and right.
CJ, your laptop should have given warnings of low battery state prior to shutting itself down, I would think. Typically, you get a “batt low” warning at 15%, and only get the shutdown at 5%. Of course, depending on the age of your battery, there might not be much duration between 15% and 5% states. Or had it been on standby long enough that it might have achieved Low State in that condition, then you tried to bring it awake?
May I suggest that you install the backup, whatever it may be, on all your computers. This way you don’t have to transfer it from one to the other in order to be backed up. This closes another hole in the process.
I love the coincidence of finding your glasses just as the new ones show up. I have had too many of that sort to do much more than laugh.
And just to add to the weird quotient of the last 2 days—Jane’s dead Toshiba laptop decided to wake up.
Too strange! What brought that on?
Gremlins
It is getting on towards that time of October…night of the living dead computer?
I have audio completely turned off. I’ve nearly had a heart attack when somebody has turned the sound on, on the main computer, and I push a button and get a beep. My concentration is pretty deep when I’m working, and a beep sounds like the crack of doom. Your scenario re Low State during standby is accurate, however. I’d been fixing dinner in the interval.
That’s quite a headline! Needless to say you got this crowd’s attention! I back up my novel on 4 computes and a thumb drive. I keep expecting something to happen to the thumbdrive, as that is the copy I keep most current. I’m glad you were able to recover without any permanent damage.
Oh my dear sweet Ghu.
External hard drive, also. You can get them in sizes up to Really Big, and they’re not hard to set up and use – they pretty much just plug in.
I also burn CDs with stuff – that’s saved me more than once. (Assume hard drive death about every three years, or complete machine replacement at about the same interval, and be prepared.)
I have a proper harddrive for a proper backup where I can draw everything off the system, too – but the one I use is a pocket drive that draws power from the system. It doesn’t need any further setup or switching on, and it’s virtually silent. Fan noises bother me, and this is just so quick and painless that I actually *do* it.
Okay, CJ, I’m not a usual WP user, but here’s what I think you need to do. Find a good-sized recent (less chance of wearing out its little grey cells) flash drive. Ideally, you want one that plugs completely into your laptop, a card rather than a thumb drive, just to prevent it getting bumped. Duct tape it into your laptop!
Now go to WP Settings / Files / Documents. You’ll see two folders, one for the file, one for the backups. Set one for the laptop disk and one for the flash drive. Tick the box that says to also save the original on the backup folder; this saves two copies in the backup folder, the timed backup and the last save. At your typing speed, I’d set it to save every minute: if it’s like Word, this will be pretty invisible, especially since your laptop drive is cached and flash drives are nearly trans-luminal.
You will now ALWAYS have at least three copies of your work on two different devices, though you should still back up to the terabyte drive in case of laptop loss or destruction.
If you have one of the One Touch style externals, you can plug in your laptop, wait a little bit for it to recognize the drive, then press the button on the drive to do everything automatically. If you can manage to make that part of your routine (as you go to dinner?) then you will have a long archive of backup copies on the external drive in addition to the other two devices.
But I hope the flash card technique will be so utterly painless you’ll forget you’re even doing the backup–until the next disaster. (Don’t you love “disaster”? Bad star! Naughty star!)
Walt, I like this idea best of all. She’s got a flash card in the computer. I’m going to go set her WP to do exactly as you suggest. Going to get a little card that will fit in my new machine and do the same. Excellent idea!
Oh, because flash memory has a lower life span than disks, you might want to “technically” save the backups to the laptop and the primary documents to the flash drive. Since you’re ticking the box to put the original will the backups, the original would be on the laptop disk in this setup.
The down side is that the original is not where you expect it, so if you were to remove the duct tape and take out the flash card, you might alter the backup of the original, and then they would be out of sync.
On the other hand, if you can go back to floppy days, think of the flash card as a floppy and where your novel “really” lives.
When I recommended a thumb drive above, I certainly did not intend it as a long-term backup strategy! Rather, it is a short term backup, written over daily. It protects against catastrophic hardware failure, such as what CJ and Jane faced. It does not replace a comprehensive hard drive backup! But for non-enterprise situations that most of us face, I recommend the thumb drive for daily backups, and a monthly full-disk backup to another media (external hard drive preferred). This is what I do with my G4 PowerBook. The Time Machine is perfect for the monthly backups.
But it all comes down to risk assessment: how long can one afford to wait before data loss becomes unacceptable? In CJ’s case, I would hazard that even a daily backup of the book files is unacceptable. If I were her, I would backup half-way through my work day and at the end.
The advantage of using the auto-backup of the word processor is that it can backup every minute. A flash card, being a single component, is far less likely to fail than some part of a complex laptop. Of course, they do fail over time and while this has improved, I’m not certain how much, even with the ability to discard failed sections automatically.
No backup plan is useful if it is so onerous or odious that the user doesn’t comply with it. Or if the user simply does not have the time or attention to spare for the plan. With the terabyte drive around, but not having a recent backup on it, we’re clearly in this situation. The flash card backup should be totally invisible and require no effort. The user need remember nothing, and once active, the user need follow no procedure to make backups. All is automatic.
But also, using the word processor’s save function will bring both copies current.
I reread your previous post more carefully. Okay, if one can specify where the backup file is (different from where the main file is), then that is clearly the best solution. I agree with you that transparent automatic backup is best for the user, noobie or power. (Hmmm, I wonder if OpenOffice can do that? Off to check…)
I had to google it to find the answer for OpenOffice, but here it is:
First, open the “Tools|Options” menu and look under General|Paths. There you can specify the exact path/directory for the backup file.
Next, still in the Options menu, go to “Load-Save|General”. There check “Always create backup copy” and “Save Autorecovery information every…” and determine how often it saves the file.
I’m going to start using this with a thumb drive and see how well it works.
MS Word is also capable of this.
That was a scary Halloween Story!
Oh coincidence!
Not half an hour before reading your post, CJ, I heard of yet another potter who lost years of glaze recipes because she only had one paper copy of her work. No huge disaster, just a broken window, wind and water and non indelible ink. I burn disks of everything and store them with friends. I know this is not practical for you, but it can give great peace of mind for reference work.
P.S. Very interesting essay by Lewis Hyde in the Sunday October 4 New York Times Book Review “Advantage Google”
Couple notes for you CJ
A flash drive is the last place I’d use as a backup for critical data. They’re great for convenience and okay as backups but notorious for going bad too and/or just losing files. Even the major brands.
If you do decide to backup online, since yours is a proprietary work, I would only back up encripted copies of something you care about being stolen. Very convenient, reliable and most peoples stuff is not worth the effort to look at/copy but employees at online storage facilities can be anybody and you are a recognizable “name”.
Always minimum of 2 backups which I’ve seen you say yourself, but they should be to different .. technologies.. flash drive is okay as a backup backup but…. external drive, networked drive or online storage (if encrypted) are the ways to go.
Hard drives certainly do have problems and go bad, but losing the power to one or any part of the system or frying the processor or mobo is very unlikely to result in you losing the data on the drive. It might be inaccessable to the avg user but even in the unlikely event that after fixing the pc problem the hard drive was fried – there are many folks who make successful businesses out of recovering the data from bad drives.
I think you are probably correct about thumb drives, but I do not believe so about flash cards, which have no mechanical parts.
Also, the flash memory will be accessed continuously. If it fails, the backup will fail, and an error will be announced. At that point you install a new flash card.
The backup process only fails if the flash card and the laptop hard drive fail almost simultaneously. Possible but unlikely. Most importantly, it’s better backup than currently exists. Is it best? No, but…
“The best is the enemy of the good.”–Voltaire
Having fried a hard drive on a laptop by dumping hot tea on the lower right corner of the keyboard and then pricing the recovery solutions (expensive) I went to automatic and online.
Hey, all you smart people…Is there a backup that will auto backup via FTP? i.e., so we could create a storage spot right on her domain.
Hi Jane, yes – Cobian Backup, which I’ve already recommended. It will create a zip or 7-zip archive, it will use strong encryption if required, it will backup to FTP, or email a backup, or backup to a network location, or external drive. It will backup to any number of different destinations simultaneously. It will do backups manually, or automatically on any kind of schedule. There are a lot of other features. It is free and open source (and that doesn’t make it any less professional than expensive commercial software).
FTP to your server is a good idea.
Go to Cobiansoft, download it and try it out. You can’t lose anything by trying.
FTP is kind of old school in my mind. I’d be looking at going to a wireless LAN, possibly using netbooks. I think the ideal would be to have a desktop acting as a server, using RAID 1 or better. You could then use almost anything to transfer files to a USB drive using the Windows (or other) scheduler. This server would be quite inexpensive, needing minimal computing, graphics, etc. The big thing it needs are redundant and inexpensive disks. Hey! That spells RAID. Funny coincidence, that. (Yes, I know the A is array.)
In this model you or CJ would work with files that live on the server, communicating with it over the wireless LAN. You could drop your laptops into the pond, and nothing would be lost but the last minute’s work. But be careful about wireless security: Wired Equivalent Privacy isn’t.
Note that the backup drive can be located a significant distance from the server system, even outside the house, assuming proper temperature and humidity.
I would not put anything into free online backup unless it was seriously encrypted. And if you’re just backing up the current novel, that’s relatively small. You can just email that to yourself using some web mail other than Google–Yahoo, whoever.
Note that at least one court has held that cleartext transmitted by Internet is public information with no expectation of privacy.
HOLY SHEEIII*****TTT! as they tends to drawl down here in the south!!!!!!!!! being a big fan of the foreigner series, am VERY glad y’all saved that just in case!
ms cherryh, what about getting one of the small “portable” external hd’s that can be kept with the laptop at all times? a friend of mine “cyborg’d” her laptop by velcro’ing a western digital passport drive to the top of her laptop for extra space since she had an 80gb hd – the wd passport drives come with backup sw
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=701
the reviews for the online services indicates they are’nt really ready for primetime yet, and this keeps the backups available in house. or, here’s a review of backup sw that has ftp capabilities http://data-backup-software-review.toptenreviews.com/
for my mac laptop i have an external drive hooked into my hub i plug into in my “office” area and it does incremental backups…
D
oh and i can recommend some good wine for those types of nights! 😉 from “down under” the gumdale vineyard puts out some very nice affordable reds and chardonnay! hubby is a bit of a wine snob and loves these!
D
There’s a program called AutoSave Essentials by Avanquest (www.avanquest.com) that will automatically backup every file that you modify, to for instance an external or networked drive.