Today was a rubbish day with my ME/CFS symptoms knocking me around a bit more than usual and due to having some changes to my HRT my breasts were sore as well. A good day for concentrating on sorting out some of my writing I thought as it will help to take my mind off feeling less than my best.
My daughter studied electronics and computer science at university and she works from home so we have a home network with a server, sub-server and all manner of switches, cables and bits living in a converted wardrobe. I'm good with the hardware side of things and my daughter is an expert programmer so we make a good team. So anyway our old server was too wimpy and we needed more hard drive space. Problems with data corruption and network faults had been driving my daughter batty so I built up a new server with a modernish NOS dual core server motherboard in an old HP E800 server case we had lying around. All good, the case had room for plenty of hard drives so by the time we'd finished our home setup was streets ahead of our old system. Backup data needed to be re-installed as well as all the drama of setting up the network and operating system so I left that in my daughter's capable hands.
Move onto today and when I decided to bring one of my half completed manuscripts back from the archives to look it over again I was horrified to discover that the latest version update wasn't there. This is my greatest nightmare as a writer, - losing a manuscript is like having a bit of yourself cut off and lost for ever. Once before I had this happen. Some years ago I purchased a brand new hard drive to archive all my manuscripts onto, - including some very old ones that I didn't want to lose. Three months later the rotten piece of junk died and nothing could be recovered from it, - and believe me I tried; - I even hired a specialist to have a go trying to find something on it with no luck at all.
Eventually I was able to restore my archive after digging out every WIP and back-up disc I possessed with the loss of only one manuscript because the old media it was on was too far gone to read. I really liked that particular story too :(
Here's a tip, - never buy a Maxtor hard drive because they're junk. IT folk I spoke to later about my hard drive dying confirmed that fact for me too. I just wish I'd known that before I purchased the $@!%& thing. :icon_burn:
It took me a long time to trust computers enough to use them as writing machines. Before then I was strictly pen and paper, though I eventually changed over to using a massive old electric typewriter a neighbour put out for the curbside rubbish collection. After a little repair and adjustment it served me well for many many thousands of words before it finally turned up its toes.
A friend who had a Commodore 64 (remember those) tried to persuade me into the computer age, but when I had a go and a pencil accidentally dropped on the keyboard completely clearing the screen I backed away from it like it was a child of the devil. :icon_chainsaw:
Eventually I started using a computer, - an old IBM machine running DOS with a beautifully simple word processor programme which I really liked. I called it my smart typewriter and I was happy with that for a long time. Everything was backed up several times to 5 & 1/4 inch discs (remember those) so I didn't fear data loss, the fear of sudden power cuts always haunted me though so I saved often.
Then folk started talking to me about Windows and the internet and were trying to persuade me away from my old DOS machine. It was gaming though that finally made me enter the modern era because I wanted to play the first version of Tomb Raider (remember that?) and along the way I picked up a copy of Star Office (no Word for Windows for this girl) and kept on writing.
Just as an aside I went on to own all the classic Tomb Raider games and was even sent a free copy of Tomb Raider The Last Revelation by Eidos because I was such a little fan girl.
So anyway here I am digging back through every bit of media I can find in an effort to find a copy of the last back up I made of this darn manuscript. While I'm doing that every bit of creative scribbling I've ever done is being backed up to the cloud. I'm still suspicious of this whole idea of the cloud, but my daughter has finally persuaded me to use it and stop being a total Luddite.
The whole business of e.book publishing has made a huge difference for anyone who writes and has banished the trials of trying to convince a publisher to print your book in paper form. Having solidly worked on a manuscript every night for a year after work in an effort to make the thing fit what a publisher wanted so it would 'fit' the market I never want to go through that again. And I never got it to 'fit' because I didn't want to hack up my story that much, so I gave everybody the finger and went back to writing for my own amusement.
More than likely you will see previews of what I'm working on turn up from time to time on the Writing part of this forum. I hope and pray that my days of losing manuscripts are now over and I can simply get back to writing again without being paranoid that my hard work could go missing when I least expect it.