Yesterday I was diligently working on my computer on Elfshot and had taken a break when I discovered it crashed. Like froze up. Hard. So this isn’t the only computer crash I’ve dealt with in my life, having played software engineer and systems administrator, but still. It sucked.
The Cloud Minders
This time I had my work on two clouds. Unfortunately, the One Drive cloud didn’t have anything saved from today and couldn’t restore new versions, and I hadn’t put the new version into Dropbox yet. I also have Google Drive, which is there when I remember it. But you’d think a computer crash wouldn’t wipe out a day’s work.
It did. That was major annoying.
Not That I Haven’t Had Issues with the Cloud Before During a Computer Crash
The cloud is a nice concept, given that it’s a cluster-fuck database. (The term we used was clusters when I worked as an Admin.) Long story short, the whole thing is supposed to provide redundancy. I nearly lost one novel back in the day because I failed to copy it over to Dropbox. I ended up losing about 15,000 words and had to rewrite.
Then, my latest dead computer proved Dropbox didn’t have ALL my files from some type of ongoing computer glitch. I managed to retrieve them by ripping the hard drive out of the dead laptop and using PCmover to get most of my environment back to what it was. It’s not fail-safe software, but I’ve spent plenty of money with Laplink (the parent company) to at least trust it will get most of my work back.
Lost 500 to 1000 words
So, with this computer crash, I lost somewhere around 500 to 1000 words and spent hours getting my system to a point where I could reboot. I tried rebooting normally and it froze. Dell’s semi-worthless admin software tested the hardware and pronounced it fine. Then I reboot for the umpteenth time and selected Window’s attempt to fix it.
Thank the gods for system restore. I had turned it on when I got this desktop started and it had an image from several days ago. I restored the system and got my computer back–only to discover the missing versions of Word.
Got to love it–not!
Word Count for Yesterday
Despite all that, I did do some work. I ended up with a bit over 500 words at 25,016. Better than nothing, even though technically, I wrote more.
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