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 80,000 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.
Now that’s just about the scariest story you’ve ever told! I am glad you got it all worked out.
Scary indeed; sounds like wine was entirely necessary. Until I got a flashdrive, I got into the habit of emailing my latest draft to myself so I could retrieve it from any computer, if need be. And just reminded myself I HADN’T saved my last copy…
CJ – mozy.com. Please. There is no reason that you should have to worry about backups. You can put your own encryption key on it so nobody gets a peek at your stuff, and then you won’t lose anything, even should the house get flattened by a downburst.
Featherless Gods! I almost had heart failure reading the header. I offer grateful sacrifices to what ever patron dieties that decided to offer your files their protection.
Might I suggest a daily — if not twice daily — backup to a UBS thumb drive of all “mission critical” files? It’s a pain, I know, but that is what I do after having hard drive failures in the past that has cost me serious time, money and creative effort lost.
Glad you have everything back in order!
“Blessed is the pessimist, for he hath made backups!”
Another great backup quote! I’ve got to start collecting them.
This is a very good idea. Do we practice it? Of course not. For a few days following a panic, but after that…naw. Consequently, we either have a ton of backups…or none. We’re lucky if we actually back up to disk periodically. Thank goodness for WordPerfect’s autobackup!
And there’s really no excuse anymore, what with the high-capacity thumb drives.
Please guys. Mozy, Carbonite, SOMETHING! Sorry to yell like that. Carbonite has saved my bacon more than once.
Doubly inexcusable given Windows’ inbuilt backup abilities, modest though they be. Fie! Fie! How dare you endanger our Next Book???
:-O
My backups usually involve sending it to the desktop computer. Or a flash drive. Whichever is handiest.
So, at the end of the day, rather clicking on Start/Shutdown or Start/Standby when you’ve finished, you create a little file called SwitchOff.Cmd and double click that instead.
In this file you just put:
XCOPY
and then either:
SHUTDOWN -s
if you want it to turn off, or
RUNDLL32 powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState
if you want hibernate/standy by
“Ah yes – backups. That’s what people do just after they’ve had a system failure.”
“Ah yes – backups. That’s what people do just after they’ve had a system failure.”
Tee hee…ain’t that the truth.
What exactly does that little command stream copy? And does it work in Vista as well as XP?
I have to say, Carolyn was amazingly calm about the whole thing. When she came and asked for my Dell and explained why, I had momentary heart failure, but it didn’t last long. I got a nice little bit of insurance a while ago, a little connector that allows me to take a laptop HD and connect it to my desktop…so I was pretty sure I could get the files. Tried to reassure Carolyn on that point, but in truth, she was pretty shaken…understandably. I went in with her to wield the screwdriver and teased her endlessly about the “junk” in her startup to try and get her to relax. Had our service guy chuckling, too.
And I will say, the FIRST time the computer came back up, I made her back up that file! 😀
I recommend Cobian Backup – it’s free and open-source.
Just download and install it, and set up it up to do a daily backup. It will run automatically every day (or manually, or whatever you like). You can specify a list of folders and/or individual files to back up. It will back up to one or more destinations, such a flash drive, an FTP upload to your server, or whatever.
Once it’s set up you can just forget about it.
A backup to an online location is also a very good idea, even if it’s just something like Google Documents. Because if there is ever an incident where you loose your computer *and* your flash drives/DVDs at the same time (due to fire, theft, flood, accident, etc.) you will be very glad of an online backup. You’re not dealing with large files here, so it will just take a few seconds to back up.
If you don’t want to set up an automatic backup, then perhaps you could make it an invariable part of your routine that before you shut down your computer at night you do a manual backup.
I vote for automatic.
I second Tulrose’s vote and online at that.
Sorry to hear about the troubles, CJ. I’d also recommend investing in a small external hard drive enclosure. If this happens again, you just plug your hard drive into that and pull the data off like you would any thumb drive.
Ugh! I think three BOTTLES of wine might have been in order. And nice companion to “Jesus saves” with that “Blessed is the pessimist, for he hath made backups!” CapnKirk, hehe.
Can you please leave this level of drama for the books you write rather than your own life?
My backup strategy is to dump the folder onto an external hard drive. I don’t bother finding out which are the relevant files – I just dump the whole lot, and occasionally clean out inbetween stages. (I actually _like_ the knowledge that I take twice a year or so snapshots. I just don’t need ‘what changed from one week to the next.’) In my experience, the less effort, the easier the task becomes.
Having recently paid a fair little chunk of change to recover my music project files, I definitely identify! I realized, belatedly, that I’d slowly changed from a compulsive backer-up of data to a complacent fool. Fortunately (sorta…), a few hundred bucks is very effective negative reinforcement, and it’s back to being OCD about backups for me.
Good God! What a scare! And I was angry when my DSL crashed yesterday and I had to re-write a 200 word blurb I was doing for a website! Don’t take this risk again! Get a reliable back-up source, because no, re-writing that much of a novel from scratch will NEVER work like it did the first time. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF that it worked out!
Phew! Enough of a scare for us at this level remote. It must have been very stress inducing for you! Glad it got fixed
Backing up documents to E-mail does work well, although it isn’t an “automatic” process. Just paste the file (or as much Of the file as you are working on, or have written at this sitting) into a message and send it to yourself. Or a friend.
Or, assuming your provider allows a “spare” email “box”, set one up and send to That address. Something you can download from at need, but is Not on your list of accounts to download from normally. Or configure your email program (Outlook?) to leave a copy of received messages on the server. Free storage, there.
Only as good as the reliability (ask if they Do backups on their servers..) of your provider, but certainly better than nothing. And no thumb drives to lose 🙂
If you get a free gmail account, you can just attach the file and e-mail it to that. Gmail gives you oodles of storage – several GB – so you can just do that.
Only use a gmail account that your *don’t* retrieve mail from, because otherwise Gmail will helpfully send all those files back into your inbox, which can get old soon.
Read the Terms of Service (ToS) first! Google has a great reputation–kinda. They don’t do anything bad to their users’ data that I’ve heard, but their ToS are Draconian. They are not known for upholding authors’ copyrights, either.
I should – but I figure that zipped up files sent by me to my own account are something they’ll neither will nor can steal.
Ooo…I like this idea!
given the ongoing computer struggles, one wonders why Bren has not yet encountered similar …..
maybe he has a Mac
:runs:
Big goggle eyes at the headline… Big sigh of relief by the end of the post. Don’t scare us like that! I’m going to have palpitations all afternoon.
Aja Jin — Hark! Another Mac user? We’re probably the only 2 out of the 500… And I did have a Mac that turned into a paperweight once, but the transformation into a lump of scrap plastic was prefaced by a whole lot of hinky behavior ahead of time — allowing plenty of time for backups before the final death rattle. Of course, it happened during the last couple of hours of a deadline freelance project, necessitating an emergency trip to Circuit City, and the purchasing of $6,000 worth of hard- and software to finish a $600 job…
Definitely not the only Mac users. (Considerably more Macs than people in my household.) Mine has a dodgy DVD drive, and my old iBook is on the blink, but that’s after, errm, more years than I care to remember right now.
My MacBook used to throw kernel panics for one particular client. Half the kernel panics I had were in his presence. I should have listened to my Macbook’s instincts!
I love Macs but they’re not indestructible – I had one actually burn. Literally. Beyond retrieval. True story.
I have a mac, but I can’t get online with it at our new house, with the new service provider. For some reason, surely due to my ignorance. My spouse, who seems to resent being the designated computer guy, stopped when he got the PC on line and suggests it is up to me to manage the mac since I was the one that wanted to buy it. So I got an air card with AT&T and will dispense with the home network. that’ll show him!
when he isn’t looking, sneak onto his computer and look at the settings he is using. Chances are, you’re using the wrong kind of protocol somewhere.
Thank the Lord Harry for that. At least the blog post had the word ‘nearly’ in it. At last a spoiler I approve of.
You have been sufficiently flogged by everyone screaming “BACKUP!!1!!”, so I won’t add to the commotion. I’m merely glad that the proto-brick could be salvaged, along with your hard work.