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Commissioned to write two more articles...one due in a week. Eeek!
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message 51:
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Andre Jute
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Nov 01, 2012 04:08PM
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I think it's one of those American quirky things that took off when no one expected it to.I should get my rump in a chair and start typing.
Yeah, it was originally a San Franciso thing, then spread from there.
I'm already a day late to start. And today will make it two days late. Typical writer.
I want to rewrite my article to add that Microsoft Word is GARBAGE! Autosave didn't work once yesterday and neither did Save. 4000 words down the gurgler, gone, vamooshed. No autorecovered document, no sign of any word document worked on yesterday at all. I may as well have written the 4000 words in the air with my finger. Back to Scrivener.
Yikes, Katie!Many years ago I had just finished a video script for a client when my darling cat jumped on the keyboard and wiped out about 12 hours of work.
Another time I lost a whole book when a remodeling guy sliced through a cord on my computer, shorting it out and frying everything on it. I've learned to do back ups since then. I send everything to an online email address. Then to a second online email address.
I've been sending stuff to Dropbox (online cloud site) but I'd been doing it by saving it to Word, closing Word and then copying the file to Dropbox. From now on I'll be saving it as a new file every day and also doing Save As to the Dropbox folder as well before I close. AND it will be in Scrivener.As someone kindly pointed out, it's not like this work was really important or necessary for a deadline, but I was really into the swing of things and rewriting it is definitely not as much fun!
That really bites, Katie! Important work or not, time is precious. Though autosave usually works well for me, I've pretty much never trusted anything Microsoft puts out.
Patricia, I'm pretty sure I would have a meltdown if 12 hours of work were lost.
I send my work to two email addies too, and also to Dropbox, though I'm looking into SugarSync on the advice of my fave techie xpert. But I'm not as diligent as I aught to be, and this is a good reminder. (sorry, Katie!)
Good reminder for me, too. I can't recall the last time I backed something up.
...and aren't you the techie here, Kat? Shame on you!
Meltdown is right. And shame on Kat too!In over thirty years on Apple gear I've never lost a file. That's the point of reliable gear. Currently my system backs up every hour to an external hard disc, which I swap around (by selecting on screen, they're all plugged in and running all the time) every month or so, so that two systems have to go down simultaneously before I lose more than an hour's work, and three have to go down simultaneously before I lose more than a month's work. Even then the work will probably be out with an editor, or on Dropbox, or on my iPad or smartphone. the chances of losing anything are infintesimally small. I also back up to my private space on our corporate servers automatically.
The software that does it, Time Machine, comes free with the OS from Apple. Just checked. It last backed up 41 minutes ago.
I, and no doubt you, can also back up to Apple's cloud, Amazon's cloud, my service provider's cloud, the Coolmain Press cloud, etc, etc, every day a new free cloud offer drops in through the mailbox. (I don't because I haven't looked into the privacy/security issues.)
Even better, I can open 30-year old files in current software. You try that on a Windows System and you'll go nuclear with rage.
Best thing my parents ever did for my education and career, give me an Apple II when I showed a talent for programming a little game on my Dad's before I started school, and a Mac when they first came out.
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But your parents did much more for you. Your father and grandfather, by taking you to the office, inculcated the belief that you could compete with men, even in engineering, on even terms. Your parents, by taking you along to all these foreign countries rather than putting you in boarding school, gave you the languages and tolerance for differences that stopped you becoming just another zero-culture engineering barbarian.
Smart observation.I totally disclaim responsibility for the other engineers. If more of them were women, people wouldn't make cracks about their insensitivity.
Zero culture engineering barbarian.I'll have to steal that phrase.
