Ask Jane the gruesome details. A years-long project. Within two scenes of finished. Two days before Christmas.
The computer had failed before. Repaired.
Then Carbonite failed. Still not working right—won’t restore.
Then the battery fell out of contact in the computer bottom while the computer was doing a routine autosave.
Corrupted the Only True File of said novel.
Ordinary recovery procedures wouldn’t work.
But thanks to Lynn—we have a very GOOD Christmas gift.
If you don’t let anything be written to the disk until you can get a fix, you stand a fighting chance, and boy, did we fight for this one.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO US, EVERY ONE!
THANK YOU, LYNN!
You really had me scared there.
Merry Christmas to all.
O.M.G. Palpitations, panic, and well-designed profanity I would imagine. Dearly hope you found it hiding someplace! And got it all back. Copious amounts of single-malt are called for. Wishing both you and Jane a wondrous Christmas and a grand New Year.
Ye gads and little fishes! Uh… Oh, that would be… beyond horrible. — I have lost project files before, and had hard drives (and backup disks) crash.
Poor Jane! I am SO glad that things were recovered. Blessings to Lynn, to Jane, and to you, CJ.
A major celebration is most definitely in order.
Jane surely deserves a calm rest after all that.
Ach du lieber Mein Gott im Himmel! O ye four hundred thousand gods and goddesses! I take it this means that Lynn was either able to perform a holiday miracle and retrieve the files from a broken drive, or she had kept a backup of her own for Jane’s work. Either way, good on her, and Jane must be invoking the Captain and Lime in her honor about now!
Once upon a time I did something *really* stupid to a client’s computer…at 2AM…when I’d promised to have it fixed by…9AM. Gulping panic, I searched for and found something called Data Recovery Wizard (http://www.easeus.com/). I don’t know how it works; I’m not sure I want to know. The manual, such as it is, is written in what is commonly called “Chinglish.” But it saved my bacon then and, yesterday, a newer version did the same for Jane.
Actually, Lynn knows more than a little something about software and was able to point us at a program capable of finding fragmented and hidden file-lets on a disk. The program is called EaseUS, not too pricey, and it happens to be on sale today—the day after we bought it—but are we complaining? No. Back in the day we could get at the whole C directory, and we knew intimately what was where, and how a file worked, and should we lose anything, we had a few programs like Golden Retreiver that could scan for almost any criterion. Now—EaseUS to the rescue.
Needless to say, Jane is to be heartily congratulated. In the not too distant future the entire Netwalkers series will have a conclusion, 25 years in the making, and you will be able to read it.
Jane’s version of same: http://www.janefancher.com/HarmoniesOfTheNet/
I live with this fear every day as I finish my first real novel. That fear prompted me to get a brand new external drive to augment by offsite backups. I hope you get it all restored soon. Best of luck.
Re Carbonite: I’ve been a fan for a long while and have restored full systems at least 3 times from their backups. 10 days ago I noticed that Carbonite was waiting for the server, and waiting,and waiting, and chewing up cycles on my elderly system. I got hold of support and asked what was happening. The server I’m attached to is down for maintenance. And no, they had no idea when it would be back up, they were hoping for the next day. I let them know that they can certainly inform people of scheduled maintenance of a server and post something on FaceBook for unscheduled, or have a pop-up on the web site, etc etc. I hooked up a spare external drive and am now doing the belt-and suspenders thing by copying my changed data files to it before shutting down overnight and keeping at least 2 weeks worth of data there just in case. Quel pain!
And something I thought I mentioned before about Carbonite … very large files get backed up no more than once in a 24-hour period unless you force the issue and wait for it to be backed up. I’ve got around this by creating a compressed backup file of my large files before I close for the day. These backup files have the current date in the file name so each one is unique and they are backed up by Carbonite immediately. As with Jane’s opus, I’ve got at least 10 years worth of genealogy in a couple of big files. These are loaded up to Ancestry as well (belt and suspenders, you see).
Sometimes there’s something to be said for paper, too. Lightning struck —literally, a near blow—and trashed my hard disk when I’d just mostly finished Fortress. Jane and Lynn together took the printout and ran it through the crappy OCR you could get then at Kinko’s, and corrected all the 1’s back to l’s and all sorts of similar artifacts. That’s why one book has a dedication regarding ‘through the lightning strikes and all of it…’
Parchment is even better, e.g. the Archimedes Palimpsest! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
I lost one machine to a power glitch – if apparently fried something on the main board, because the power supply was on but it wouldn’t do anything else, including booting. Fortunately it didn’t fry the data drive – but in all the moving of drive cradles, the connector restraint got munged. I ended up taking it to a fix-it place, buying another external drive, and having them pull everything over (except one file whose name it objected to, and which I didn’t need).
Why you don’t write anything to the drive in a situation like that – the OS will write over anything it thinks is unused, and if it’s lost the first address in the chain of blocks that the file uses, it thinks those blocks are available. (Went out with a guy who fixed stuff like that.)
Well, since we can’t top this particular felicitous outcome,
“Mele Kalikimaka e ka Hauoli Makahiki Hou!”
…and to all, a Good Night!
Here’s another alternative, if you’re looking to replace the Carbonite… http://www.filetransporter.com It’s a “private cloud” Network Attached Storage, accessible from multiple devices, in sizes from the individual to the corporate.
I would suggest that Google Drive/Docs is a good place to do writing. It may be worth spending a few minutes looking at it, at any rate.
* Free
* Easy and intuitive to use
* Excellent word processing facilities for most needs
* All edits automatically saved in cloud storage
* Automatic revision history, and ability to easily look at, and go back to, past versions
* Collaboration with others fully supported
* Comments and suggestions supported
* Secure, you decide who has access to a file, and what level of access they have
* Download and save on your own drive any time
* Automatically sync selected folder on your own computer with Google Drive
Not my novel, no. But I’ve been bootstrapping a new version of Linux from scratch for a couple months. First, using a “host” system, one builds a “Stage 1” using the host’s compiler, libraries and utilities to compile the parts of the new versions what are essential. That complete, one uses those Stage 1 programs, which have bits of the host libraries in them, in something of a “clean room” isolated from the host, to rebuild all the new software in “Stage 2”. That results in a bootable, functioning, but extremely Spartan GNU/Linux, maybe something about the level of MS-DOS. But it’s enough to build with: nicer editors, a GUI subsystem, networking, web browsers, and so on.
Today an oversight in a boot script intended to remove old files in the common “temporary directory”, took its rath on the root directory itself. It’s all gone. 🙁 I had a backup of the Stage 1 stuff, but not the Stage 2. Now I have to run through all the Stage 2 packages. I’m on 15 of 65, compiling the compiler, and it’s been running for two hours on my 2.66GHz dual core system.
Merry Christmas, indeed! ;(
So sorry, Paul! We do understand!
MODF!!! 🙁 But I’m up to 45 of 65 complete now. I had it all in individual scripts for each package, to it’s been mainly a matter of extracting the source from its archive, changing to its directory, running the build script, backing out, deleting its directory and moving on one. Had some glitches that had been fixed once upon a time. It’s a matter of rediscovering the fix. Got one right now. Don’t know what the problem in. 🙁
I made hoodies and jammies, which we call peajuhls, from fleece for everyone. What did y’all give?
Gave my sister regular-sized and small bypass pruners. (She had a pair that was supposed to be ergonomic I guess, but as one used them, squeezing the handles, one of the handles rotated, invariably pinching the heel of one’s hand! 🙁 ) She gave me a floor lamp, torchiere with a side light, for my “command central” here. (Kinda looms over me in a way that makes me a little uneasy, but better lighting than I had.)
Gave the friend I went on the Hawaiian cruise with a gift card to Trader Joe’s, and, since she’s a beer lover, a T-shirt celebrating local craft-brewer/restauranteer McMinamen’s Terminator Stout–my recommended favorite.
The torchiere was bound for a dimmer switch in the wall. Some CFL’s can handle them, most can’t. So I went with LEDs. $35 for two bulbs! (May last longer than I do!) The light is strangely white, even mostly dimmed. Makes all the incandescents now appear yellow! 😉 One can touch the bulbs at full brightness and they’re only barely tepid. I went from a (hard to find) 200W table lamp to this torchiere/side-light, more usable light, and 20W or so! 🙂 Sort of like your Prius.
Jane and I mostly cooperated getting something we both wanted. But for minor things, we just got gloves, and socks, a DVD, and a few collapsable storage cube thingies to help neaten things up and then themselves disappear.
What I’ve found very helpful for my office cum computer-repair joint are the small plastic dishpans from the dollar store. Just drop items of a certain nature in one, and “I’ll get back to you later.” At this time of year I try to not heat that room any more than absolutely necessary, so “later” will be about April! 😉
Oh, that is a huge relief! Many years ago, I had the experience of losing my first novel within inches of finishing it, but that turned out to be a good thing because–novice that I was–it forced me to rewrite and improve, move forward. But I can’t imagine what it’s like for a professional like Jane to have that kind of scare, since completing the project is way more important than the learning experience. I’m so glad you guys were able to salvage it!
I sewed DH a lightweight cotton bathrobe in Starfleet Science blue with black trim (TOS), because the current bathrobe, while furry and warm, is a bit TOO warm for most seasons in HI.
It rained a lot over Christmas Eve and into Day. DH’s shop is fortuitously on a slight rise, because the flood waters came halfway up the parking lot, and a small planter was seen to float down the street. The rain also made the shop phones connect erratically, so we had to do some fancy footwork with call forwarding and the home phones.
The Christmas Day dinner went off well, although I stayed up late breaking down the leftovers into fridge-happy containers. One friend gave us a Cosmos calendar (yay space pr0n!) and another gave me a dishtowel with the popoki (‘cat’ in Hawaiian) chorus printed on it, demanding dinner (or Dinner). We also got tea and books, a good combo. The leftover ham bone is in the process of being rendered down into broth and bits for Portuguese bean soup for tomorrow night. Chicken is defrosting, and all is at least for a while right with the world.
Two days after Christmas and I have just finished knitting “thrummed” mittens for my cousin’s 14 year old son. Generally I knit two or three of the presents I give and realized I have never made anything for him so this year he was the lucky (but late) recipient of the… hmmm… actually, fourth knitting project of the season. Thrumming is when you knit ilocks of fluffy carded wool into the inside of the mitten, so that the many thrums form a thick, warm nest of wool for your cold fingers. I finished the first mitten midway through Christmas Eve, realized there was no way I would finish the second by the scheduled present-opening the next afternoon at my Aunt and Uncle’s and therefore spent the rest of the evening much more relaxedly wrapping presents rather than engaging in a descending fit of knitting madness hoping against hope to finish whatever overly ambitious knitting project I had chosen for the year. Strangely liberating, deciding not to attempt to finish what cannot be finished quickly.
I got all the presents wrapped “early enough” that I found myself – at 12:30 late that “evening” after my spouse had gone to bed – dipping candied orange peel I had made and other dried fruits (from Trader Joe’s) in chocolate for us to have for Christmas Dinner dessert … so maybe old habits of staying up die harder than I think.