Why do I keep doing this?

[garnigal]

I have a USB key that I keep all of my writing on. I've had hard drives crash and lost games and writing, so I figured the USB key was safer. And it was. It's just... I've had it for at least 4 years, and I'd been thinking about backing it up. As soon as I start thinking about it, it's too late.

And it's too late.

I got copies of everything I've posted on tamingthemuse and the stuff I'd posted on open_on_sunday this year, and I have most of last year's drabbles from open on sunday (nothing after July though, and I'm too lazy to look for them right now). I have most of the finished stuff on my laptop, so in terms of writing it's not too bad. I'm sure I'll remember more stuff as the evening progresses though.

What tics me off is losing the free X-stitch patterns I'd downloaded, some of which were limited time offers. Oh well, that's just a sign to do more knitting. ;)

And now I'm going to back up my laptop hard drive and start online shopping for USB keys. Oh, and burn all my photos to disk (thank god that's not what died!)

Comments

[desdemonaspace]

Ach! How aggravating!

(I wish I could knit).

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who has taught both Derek and I. She's a university student, but she teaches knitting at a local store. She taught me to knit lace! I'm on my third lace scarf since November.

[desdemonaspace]

Wow! My grandma tried to teach me to crochet lace, but I was hopeless at it.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

One of these days I'll remember to take pictures before I give the scarves to their new owners and post on the blog. They look quite lovely and are surprisingly simple. I did mostly cross stitch before, and I'll have to go back to it soon - two baby announcements for some expectant friends.

[desdemonaspace]

It must be nice to be so accomplished.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Hee. You should talk to my boyfriend and boss about my accomplishments. The house is utterly trashed and I only know how to cook three meals. I surf the web more than work. I love to read, but I only read genre lit because "literature" bores me to tears. Mostly I watch TV and play video games.

I'm very accomplished at TV and video games.

[jen-the-great.livejournal.com]

That totally sucks. I'm glad you'll get some of it back, but it does serve as a good reminder. I need to back up my gigs of shitty vacation pictures.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Burn to CD. Way easier to transport to show people and you've got a copy. Plus you can keep adding later. I'm trying to set up a regular schedule for that - like season changes, change the furnace filter and burn last season's photos.

Whether I actually do that or not....

[dangerous-47.livejournal.com]

Aww. I hate when that happens. My laptop is being totally unreliable so I have everything on a external hard drive. *Sigh*

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've had to drives crash and burn - totally unrecoverable. I lost a lot of X-Files fic that time, but what really burnt my butt was losing my saved locations in the games I was playing. :)

[dangerous-47.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I can imagine that. :)

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Oh well, it's like a whole new game when you play it again 2 years later (because you are too frustrated for 48 months to even look at it).

[dangerous-47.livejournal.com]

Haha.

[jemaba.livejournal.com]

Eesh, that sucks, and I feel ya. Even if I wanted to finish my old fanfic WIPs, I couldn't because they died with my computer. Now I save everything important online in one form or another.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Thank heavens I post everything on LJ. I had to go back through the archives and stuff, but I got everything back from this year. And (most of) last year, including all my unfinished Nanos were on my laptop already.

I had some Serenity X-stitch patterns that are totally unfindable now though. Googling keeps giving me X-stitch Serenity Prayer or bugs. :) I'll have to find images and convert them myself - which may actually work out better than the patterns I had.

[baensidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh no! Sadly, it seems that no matter how much you back something up, it will still find a way to get lost. -_- Sorry, man; I hope you manage to recover most of it?

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Most of it, including all my unfinished Nanos. :)

Fact is, I do it to myself by not maintaining multiple copies. I can't get too upset. And hey. New USB key, with more than 256 MB on it.

... oops, wrong login.

[baensidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh, good; glad to hear it!

And ooh, new toy. ;) I recently invested in an external drive, so it's currently serving all of my backing-up needs-- and while I know that it's just as likely to fail as anything else, given time, I still feel better. I've had... three? complete computer failures in my time, plus any number of back-up disks that randomly decided not to read, so anything that offers a little more security is good.

Re: ... oops, wrong login.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

Well, with any luck, the internal and external drives will fail at different times. At one point, we had a file server and I was using that, but the files got out of sync and of course the one that failed was the one that had the up to date files.

Re: ... oops, wrong login.

[baensidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course!

[jerusha]

*hugs* Suck. I'm so sorry. I hate it when that happens.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

This wouldn't be such a blow to my ego if I hadn't already gone through two or three hard drive crashes/disk failures before.

I swear to god I'm a real brunette, despite all evidence to the contrary.