Does it have the auto saving function? I'm sometimes losing stuff when I get distracted by the TV and hit "No" in the "Do you want to save the changes" dialogue box
Losing work
- Thread starter Flanderso
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Ywriter backs up every day by default, has decent autosav, and can I think sync with mobile app.
Ack. I'll observe a moment of silence for your lost work (and everybody else's, including mine).
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I need to create a better system for backups. I write from a flash drive, because I do a lot of writing on the go with my itty bitty travel laptop, but when I'm home I use my old monster laptop. So in *general* I have everything backed up to both computers, with the most recent versions on my flash drive. Periodically, I will back up to Dropbox or Google Drive. I only use the free Dropbox, and it has ample storage for tons and tons of Word and Scrivener files.
I have my whole home laptop backing up weekly to an external hard drive. Of course, that wouldn't help a catastrophic event in my home, but it does protect against the computer malfunctioning.
That aside, YES, you will be able to recreate something even better than what you lost. That's what we do, right?
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I need to create a better system for backups. I write from a flash drive, because I do a lot of writing on the go with my itty bitty travel laptop, but when I'm home I use my old monster laptop. So in *general* I have everything backed up to both computers, with the most recent versions on my flash drive. Periodically, I will back up to Dropbox or Google Drive. I only use the free Dropbox, and it has ample storage for tons and tons of Word and Scrivener files.
I have my whole home laptop backing up weekly to an external hard drive. Of course, that wouldn't help a catastrophic event in my home, but it does protect against the computer malfunctioning.
That aside, YES, you will be able to recreate something even better than what you lost. That's what we do, right?
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I should have been cleared. The little hand belonged to my then 2 year old niece, who also sat at my desk and pressed down on the * and starred my page. Then blamed it on Blueberry the cat.
How secure are Google Drive and Dropbox? Can some evil person get in and muck with your files?
Everyday I back everything to a flash drive - beyond that I don't to anything. I've thought about getting an external drive... but thinking about it is as far as I've gotten.
It's possible. If you're practicing basic safe use (unique password, long, mixed use of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols; stored in a reputable password manager) it's not likely.
Anything online anywhere is potentially crackable. That's the nature of online.
Moreover, you should have multiple redundant backups; local offline, online, remote and portable, and even hard copy in case of disaster.
Consider emailing yourself copies of work regularly, using a Web based email account that you only use for this purpose.
Consider regularly placing a USB drive somewhere you don't live that's likely to be safe in the even of a local disaster (i.e. a friend or relative).
Good tips, thanks. I retired from my engineering job before the whole 'cloud' thing really took off, and I've been lazy since so have fallen far behind. I do send myself copies of my work via my gmail account - so there's that at least. I'll do some investigating. Again, thanks for the info.
Quick tip: it's a bad idea to open files that are stored on a USB drive and work on them from there. A USB port (especially the one on a keyboard) isn't as powerful as your computer drive, and you're increasing the risk of file corruption. You might be able to get away with it when using applications that don't require much memory, but I've dealt with the aftermath of students corrupting Adobe-app files quite a few times. Personally, I wouldn't risk it.
You lost a piece of work, but you didn't lose the creativity it took to make all those beautiful tweaks.
And that lost work wasn't written by trying to relive a moment, it was a freshly minted moment of its own. Trying to recreate what went so beautifully yesterday is a sure-fire way of having a bad gig tonight, to use an analogy to something I've got more experience in.
Good luck with today's moments!
And that lost work wasn't written by trying to relive a moment, it was a freshly minted moment of its own. Trying to recreate what went so beautifully yesterday is a sure-fire way of having a bad gig tonight, to use an analogy to something I've got more experience in.
Good luck with today's moments!
It's a glitch in MS Word, I don't remember which version it was. Whole thing, all stars, started happening before my eyes. I have no idea what I did differently, but I should have just quit and not saved. I think the back up version would have come back, though I'm not sure.
I am certainly not alone, as I learned going to google to try and find a fix. Ultimately, I lost the scene and some editing and had to do them again on the last version saved.
Good tip. I only use the USB to store backups. I backup to there at the end of my work day, and whenever I'll be away from the computer for a while. All previous versions are there too.
This. In general USB memory sticks love large atomic operations. Like copying files.
Some of the older applications opened a file and left it open during editing, which often lead to corruption. Without delving into gory details let's just say it's because Windows treats USB memory drives differently than hard disks. The more recent applications tend to save to another file in one block, delete the old file, then rename the new file with the old name. Again, a series of atomic operations that are transparent to the user.
To avoid any problem, just stick with this recipe:
1) Copy the file locally.
2) Edit the file locally.
3) Copy the local file back to the memory stick when you are done, using another name if you want to keep older versions around.
-cb
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I use Dropbox for my remote backup (which also lets me get the files when I'm working on a different computer). I also use Time Machine on my Mac to 1) back up the computer in general, and 2) manually copy selected files to the Time Machine disc. Periodically I also copy my writing files to a thumb drive.
I used to make paper backups as well, but I've been a bit lax there recently.
A USB drive is a small storage drive, and it's not nearly so powerful as you computer's hard drive. USB ports run at a lower bandwidth than your main drive, and there are different levels of ports: 1, 2, and 3 (the keyboard is typically 1.0 or 1.1, meaning it's the weakest level).
So, if you have a file open on your USB drive, and the software application is on your hard drive, that means the app has to run through the USB port, which, as I mentioned, is not as powerful as your hard drive. And if you're dealing with memory-hog software like Adobe CC, trying to run files through a USB port is just asking for trouble. It may be the most effective way to corrupt your files.
We have signs up in the classrooms reminding students to not open files from their USB drives, but it happens sometimes anyway that they do it and wreck their files. I think more because it's easy to forget than because they're ignoring what they were told, but the ones who learn it the hard way usually learn the lesson really well.
The lesson in all of this is that paranoia is a good thing when it comes to backups, and redundancy upon redundancy for backup solutions is very, very wise.
I think it's also interesting to hear about the different approaches to losing one's work -- it seems to affect each of us and our creative processes differently. I couldn't NOT hear the ghosts of my lost work in my head for months, so I had to do something else while waiting for them to fade, while others are able to work through that and forge on ahead right away. The neat thing in these different approaches is that we didn't let this deter us from writing! Granted, some of us might have moped/sulked/wailed "CRIVENS!" much longer than others...but we carried on. And I'm sure it made our writing strong. Or at least made us more determined, right?
I think it's also interesting to hear about the different approaches to losing one's work -- it seems to affect each of us and our creative processes differently. I couldn't NOT hear the ghosts of my lost work in my head for months, so I had to do something else while waiting for them to fade, while others are able to work through that and forge on ahead right away. The neat thing in these different approaches is that we didn't let this deter us from writing! Granted, some of us might have moped/sulked/wailed "CRIVENS!" much longer than others...but we carried on. And I'm sure it made our writing strong. Or at least made us more determined, right?
Agree with this. If you need to use the backed-up file from your USB drive, first copy it to your computer's hard drive, then work on it from there. And it's not a bad idea to keep another copy in a separate folder on your hard drive, as well. I do a lot of this kind of thing for my technical scientific files, as pure precaution, and I've had a few occasions to bless whatever gods there are that I did so.
caw
caw
Once upon a time, my computer quit. My novel and everything else was gone, or so I believed. The guys at the computer repair shop were able to get everything back for me. The experience was so horrific that I now clone my hard drive 1x/mo. I back up my work at least twice a day to two different flash drives and my writing app and my word processor both make their own backups.
I don't like cloud backups, but I do like the idea one of the posters here mentioned, about emailing himself (please forgive me if I used the wrong gender) a copy and now I will adopt blackbird's method of keeping an extra copy in a separate folder.
I don't like cloud backups, but I do like the idea one of the posters here mentioned, about emailing himself (please forgive me if I used the wrong gender) a copy and now I will adopt blackbird's method of keeping an extra copy in a separate folder.
I'm asking what you mean by “not as powerful”. And, what that has to do with the potential for currupting files.
If you have an fike open on a SDD, it means you have to go through the SATA port… if it's a network share, it has to go through networking layers, etc. So going through (whatever) is not meaningful by itself.
Do you mean it needs more amps? I don't think so, since it will not start at all if there’s not enough power, and low power is good not bad.
You mention bandwidth, and I agree that many USB drives are slow. But why would that cause corruption?
If you are merely saying that having open, writable, files on the USB drive is known to cause corruption, I don't think that “power” has anything to do with it. It can be that drives are easily yanked out, and they typically use the FAT file system which is not journaled.
I used to take a USB drive with all manner of utilities and files to use on lab computers and embedded systems that are not on the network, and never had any problem (other then remembering to take it with me when I leave).
Ultimately it comes down to user impatience. Or more precisely failure to understand there is a lot of things going on behind the curtain when the user presses the "Eject" button. And nothing happens. For a while.
-cb
And some people drive after having a few drinks without getting into accidents, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
You don't have to believe me, but USB drives are notorious for being easily corrupted, so anything you can do to help prevent that is a smart move.
Why would you work off a USB when you have a hard drive available? Maybe you can, but why risk it?
I work on my hard drive, then at the end of my writing session I back up my latest version to the USB. I an currently working on version 14 of my WIP. That version is saved on both my desktop and on the USB. Same process applies to my cover art.
People here report issues with working from the USB, why take the risk?
I work on my hard drive, then at the end of my writing session I back up my latest version to the USB. I an currently working on version 14 of my WIP. That version is saved on both my desktop and on the USB. Same process applies to my cover art.
People here report issues with working from the USB, why take the risk?
I'm questioning the reason that the issues reported are because internal drives are “more powerful”. If there is anything to it, I want to know the real problem.
Just the same, people report problems with HDD's getting corrupted or dieing, so why use a plain single drive when you have a RAID available?
People (including myself) have lost work when MS Word decides to flake out and refuses to save, or later cannot open its file. Why use MS Word when OpenOffice or plain text files are available?
Even if the disk doesn't die, you might mess up your file by saving it wrong, accidently deleting the wrong thing, etc. Why use a file system that only saves the most recent copy when versioning file systems are available?
Flash memory is good enough for every digital camera out there, including high-end dslrs. We don't expect a week's shooting to suddenly go bad. We find them to be highly reliable. Flash memory is good enough for for phones and tablets, for the operating system itself and all the files. How many people experience corruption of their device’s storage, just from saving files which is happening constantly for things like browser cache? (And note that those do use USB for the bus)
I submit that the problem isn't with USB flash drives per se, but with people yanking them out, or because they are “fake” e-bay drives that report higher capacity than they really have, or they are substandard in quality and fail easily.
Google Drive
Download "Backup and Sync" from Google (free)
Create a writing folder that will automatically sync your files to Google Drive in the background
First 15GB of storage is free
(Amazon and Dropbox have similar functionality)
Download "Backup and Sync" from Google (free)
Create a writing folder that will automatically sync your files to Google Drive in the background
First 15GB of storage is free
(Amazon and Dropbox have similar functionality)