One or two may have noticed I haven't been here in a couple of weeks. Whilst DJing in Jersey my laptop broke down - apparently a power surge in the nightclub caused the hard drive to fail. In the chaos of 500 music-less clubbers staring at me with daggers and me in a panic to swap machines, my flash drive went awol. On top of that my main external hard-drive got dropped and now doesn't show up on any machine and makes a weird clicking noise went attempting to start. 3 copies of my MS on 3 different digital locations all gone. I have a quote for data recovery of over a grand and I now have the greatest sinking feeling ever in my stomach. I know no-one has died but....
Oh dude... I am so sorry... I lost a MS once, 50k word count just gone. It was awful. It was garbage anyway and I had been meaning to edit the living crap out of it anyway.... but still, it hurt. Hang in there.
Oh man, do you have any computer-geek friends? I hope you are able to recover your data somehow. Sorry to hear about your loss (and it is most certainly a loss!). I'm going to go home and back up my computer now ...
Ouch. I'm sorry to hear about this. Hopefully you'll be able to work something out with the disk recovery option. About your clicking external hard drive, have you checked the power supply? I had this issue once when the wall wart went bad and the drive clicked like crazy trying to start up using only the power from the USB connection. Just a suggestion.
Tried a few geek friends - they all agree the hard-drive needs to have a "head-transplant" (real thing) in a clean-room by lab technicians, hence the hefty price - and no guarantees. 60,000 well polished words, half my book, not sure I have the stomach to start again - warning to everyone - you can't back up enough!
If you feel this way--and I can't claim that I ever truly have--then I recommend Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway, in which the main character's significant other burns his prized, hand-written manuscript shortly after he finishes it.
Oh, Erebh! I'm so sorry to hear this! I don't suppose you ever sent your m/s to a beta or someone to read and maybe it would be in your sent emails or they'd have a copy? I'm sure you already thought of this, but thought on the off chance, maybe there's some hope you had it somewhere "out there." I'm not the best at backing up, but I occasionally email myself manuscripts, because then they'll be on my email's storage site in my sent or received emails as attachments. Sending you virtual hugs.
Thanks Liz, I did email some version about 6 months ago but it has changed beyond recognition since - maybe I'll pimp myself out to rich old women - but I don't know any Already splashed out 600 smackers on this new laptop - arrrghhhh fckn technology my ass! Anyway, no one died... I'll just have to save up for the men in white coats - either to take me away or to recover that hard drive. @ Anthony Martin - Funny you should mention that, I was watching Black Adder the other night, the one where Baldrick burns Robbie Coltrane's - 10 years in the making - first ever dictionary but it turns out to be Black Adder's MS - hilarious episode but terribly not funny
I have at this moment a friend attempting to recover data from a hard drive that crashed over 4 months ago with two nearly complete MS and not to mention 30 poems on it. He called all excited yesterday to say that he was able to recover most of the photography I had on there...I told him straight out not to go for anything other than Word documents. I want to kill him. I've been waiting (freaking out) for months and he's been saving the wrong things!!! I have older copies of those two MS in a way less worked out form so it's not a complete loss but still... Years ago my brother re-formatted my hard drive with three nearly complete (edited and revised) MS and all my personal data so, that pretty much destroyed life back then. I'm of the mind now that you pretty much need to have everything stored on some cloud provider (or three) and in a hard copy in a vault somewhere if you want to be sure that you wont loose documents.
Another movie involving this theme is The Words, with Bradley Cooper. I thought the movie was just so-so, but the movie is about a writer who finds a manuscript from the 1940s written by a man who wrote about the death of his daughter and the subsequent disintegration of his marriage (all very traumatic), but then the m/s is left on a train and lost. It's then found in an antique store by Bradley Cooper now, and becomes a renowned bestseller, but the original author is still alive and aware of the success. Writers can relate, although non-writers probably won't find it all that compelling.
My condolences. Don't know if you want to hear this right now, but get cloud backup. Google drive is really convenient. I also use Dropbox in case my gmail account gets hacked, and it can be handy for beta reading, since you don't have to email huge files.
Been there, done that.....Quit your bitching. It's a silver lining. Here's the reason why, it's in your head. You'll re-write and it will be better. That's a fact. Now shut-up, change that diaper and type.......You're Welcome And thank you for reminding me to up-date my flash drives.
Thanks for the kind words Michael O but not sure I'm ready for your velvet gloves just yet. Right now I'd rather drown my gut in Bordeaux's cheapest, pickle a liver slightly or just pebble-dash the bathroom, maybe both before feeling the might of your wet kipper across my slack jaw. You can wait till the height of a deathly hangover boils with rage and two tabs finally kerplunk into a glass of tepid water, till I drag my sorry self into the shower, listen to the deafening fizz behind me of my effervescent pain relief foam over the tumbler's mouth in slow motion before gently prizing open my laptop with your silken words of inspiration. I will remember however, when standing on the shoulders of Gods, collecting my Nobel prize between the marbled pillars of greatness, to pause and thank you personally for saving me from the wild, horse's hoofs and hoisting me back into the literary saddle: For lifting me up and for dusting me down, for your warm embrace and for your cool calm words, your hot plate of sympathy, your fresh glass of human kindness. Sláinte
May as well have, sorry to hear mate. I dunno if you know anything about computers but is it SSD or HDD? If it's a HDD then it's most likely just a standard desktop hard-drive with a motor, and a USB plug. Open it up, remove the drive, plug it into a caddy, and see if it works. If it's SSD, well, I have no idea about dem new fangle gadgets.
Horrible. I know the feeling. I've hard not only hard drives, but Power Supplies and motherboards fail on me at the worst moments, and taking documents into the everafter. If you've had techie friends take a look, not much I can offer for help. One note for a REALLY cheap option for a safe backup, email it to yourself and make sure that the email isn't wiped off the server. That way, you're using the server as a backup drive. I do it all the time with AOL. Heck, create an AOL account and just use it for backup. Email the doc to yourself, then click on "save" to save the email. It'll sit on their server forever, completely free of Murphy's attack on you.
Power supplies and mother boards don't hold any data, you can switch both out without a care in the world. I've replaced several power supplies myself, never a mother board, though.
My heart goes out to you, erebh! I have been there, so I understand how gutted you're feeling. My computer went down and I was told by the man at the repair shop that, I needed a new hard drive at a cost of £80, I decided to buy a new computer. A man at my writing group runs computer workshops and to cut a long story short, he took my computer and managed to retrieve most of my files, which I immediately transferred on to memory sticks. So,despite 3wks of anguish my story had a happy ending. As daunting as it may seem, I'm with Michael O on this one, as the song says you need to 'pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again' Chin up - you know you can do it!
Bummer. Makes me glad I invested in Mac's time machine. My past experiences, clearly not as helpful as a geek friend: One of our computers died and the techs saved the contents, partitioned the old stuff, reinstalled the OP and we could get to the old files. But they charged less than $100 US. I have also lost files and paid a reasonable amount for file recovery software. It worked and it was worth it. Then malware killed my computer and rather than pay to have it cleaned, I went out and bought a Mac. I can still get to the files of the infected computer but can't go online with it. I could also probably clean it myself but, don't care, it was time for an upgrade anyway. Time Machine backs up the whole hard drive every hour and keeps multiple copies available so you can go back in time as far as you need to. I also put a copy of my novel and notes on three different flash drives every week. I am paranoid from past disasters. I love computers, I love what you can do with them, but man, disasters can be devastating. My heart goes out to you.
Oh crap. My condolences. I'd be drunk for a week if that happened. Make it a month. I have nightmares of something like this happening, yet every now and then forget to back up what new me and my hubbie have written down. Hang tough!
Had me worried.....Thought I might have to hit myself in the noggin with a brick a few times so I could say I felt your pain. But it would have been a lie....I don't do bricks to the head.
How dead is the internal hard drive? if it is unformatted, but readable (a computer acknowledges the presence of the drive) you can recover files with a number of free utility programs. If it's not recognized, yeah... sucks man. Sorry this happened.
That was painful to even read, much less experience. I feel for you. Besides all the previous advice I'd suggest printing (at some point).
