I just had to share this, due to the fact that i feel some people may have been in my shoes: But OH MY GOD i almost lost my novel!!!! *dies* my old computer shut down and it wont turn on anymore! I'd just saved it on my flash drive not moments before! Sadly i may have lost all my notes and stuff but the baby is safe! I repeat the baby is safe! *goes to huddle in the corner with my book and rock back and forth to try and calm down* four years of work, if not more -over 144,000 words... thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou that it didn't lose it... I'm going to go lose my mind for a few minutes now...
Just take out your hard drive and get an adapter to use it as an external drive long enough to get all your important files off of it.
Eeeek! That's stress. For future note: I'm pretty sure there's a way for hardware experts to extract files from a hard drive if the computer won't turn on. They just need the file name (or folder name).
Doesn't bear thinking about. I've had a 'near miss' myself. The pitfalls of over reliance on technology, I'm afraid.
Fortunately I've never lost work. I immediately back it up on a USB and sometimes I email myself the work when it gets a bit chunkier.
I generally feel that once in a long while, it's worth just printing the thing. Yes, you'd have to retype it if all of your computers and backups committed suicide at once, but the typing is the least of the work.
i'm wondering why you hadn't been saving the ms and your notes to the flash drive all along... hope you've learned your lesson and will do so daily, from now on... or, better yet, use an auto-save program to do it for you...
Lol okay maybe I shouldn't have said literally But it's old, and I don't get internet on it. I use my parents comp for that. Pretty much that computer was only useful for the fact that it had a working Microsoft word on it.
I lost a USB pen with two years of writing on it. It took me a while to get over that, but I just had to take it on the chin and start writing other things The thought of someone finding it, opening stuff I'd been working on bothered me more than anything..My privacy violated!
Damn. That eliminates Google Drive and DropBox. I always use a cloud service to store the writing. But if you're working on your main project on some old, unreliable piece of junk, I'd suggest investing in your hobby/future career a bit more. Save money for e.g. a laptop or try to get one for your birthday. I know the feeling, though. I used to forget that I should never ever save directly to an USB drive. When the thing craps out on you, it can make the whole file disappear never to be found or recovered.
i got an intous tablet mini for Christmas so that's out -and i start college (in july) which is before my birthday. However, i won't be getting a laptop until my Graphic design courses start, and my parents think it wouldn't be worth the money if im already getting one, even if its whole year away! Bah.... and they tell me to be patient... im going to have to just get on my dad's behind about getting a new video card -i think that's what the problem was. It's my screen that wont work i found out.
Had this problem before with my laptop. Hm.... Give it a few hours, then see if it turns on. If it turns on then f***ks up again, then give it an hour, see if it turns on, and before it goes to the home page, go into safe mode, then maybe fix the problem from there. That's what I did with my laptop, after I downloaded comodo firewall&antivirus, and I needed to go into safe mode just to remove it. Did you recently download something that might be responsible for your problem? Edit: nevermind, just read it doesnt get internet. Maybe save up to get the screen repaired?
I'm going to reiterate my "print!" advice. Not only can computers die, but compatibility changes, even for word processing files. You don't want to come back five years later and find out you can't open a file.
Breathe new live into your computer, install a linux based operating system. Linux Mint or Ubuntu 10 should be good starting places. They're not well suited for video editing/sound editing but can do everything and more than Windows. More importantly, they're a lot less demanding on system resources. I swear to you, even Windows 98 and XP machines run very smoothly and briskly on a linux-based OS whereas with any version of Windows, save for DOS, they just struggle and sputter. It's a way of reviving computers that doesn't require sewing limbs together.
Didn't you know may a dinosaur sallow all your files? Did you trust it while a dinosaur destroy everything? I don't blame you because I myself don't care about my files in a computer, but it is wrong. Every writer must take a back up of his/her necessary writings at the end of the working time ( Sorrily I myself don't do that). You can replace the older file with a new, in the external memory. However, may there is a remedy and you can recover your HD.
I once had a Jaz drive that succumbed to that one problem where Windows NT would overwrite that one area that said what files were on it. So glad my stuff was still in the burner computer's recycle bin from the day before. But that feeling sucks.
I second the Dropbox advice for your next computer. All of my writing files are on the cloud, so they update and sync whenever I close the document.
