#computer backups

[onsomekindofstartrek]

There’s an article going around about a professional romance author who was locked out of her google drive for an unspecified violation and lost 22,000 words of work that way.

And like, yes, that’s kafkaesque and yes, Google is acting abominably. The spokesperson that is quoted in the article should lose her job if she really took the attitude that the author is claiming she did. And there should be legal protections and liability insurance for this kind of thing happening to professionals who depend on online services for their livelihoods.

But at the same time this is a professional person who is inarguably showing poor backup discipline with work files, and while I wouldn’t say it to her face, I don’t think it should be controversial to say that this should be a cautionary tale.

If you have something you don’t want to lose, even just for personal reasons, and especially over the long term, there is a minimum backup discipline you should follow. And I would argue that if it’s worth anything at all, that minimum is “3-2-1.”

3: three separate backup copies of your data BESIDES the operational one.

2: two different kinds of media: yes, this could be cloud and flash sticks, or it could be flash sticks and burning to DVD (yes, I know that’s old fashioned but no, I really mean it.) This way if you accidentally erase a flash drive, you have a DVD that you’re not going to erase. If you lose access to a DVD drive you have a flash stick. If you use hard drives, you should also use flash media, in case something happens that physically ruins your hard drives like falling, heat or magnetic pulse. It could happen.

And finally, 1: you should have one backup offsite. If your house burns down and you just had three on-site backups, they could still all be ruined. And to be honest cloud storage is a slam dunk for this. It’s multiple copies and likely a different type of medium (being stored in multiple copies on hard drives) and it’s offsite. But if you ONLY use the cloud and get locked out because of corporate bullshit, then you’re just as fucked.

My recommendation for non-techie people? Have two hi-capacity flash sticks or maybe a flash stick and an external hard drive. Keep one flash stick on your keys so that if your house burns down while you are away, you have a backup with you. And then also back up to the cloud. Do all three at the same time, as often as you make a change to your files that would be impossible, time-consuming or emotionally challenging to do again.

For technologically savvy people, I swear by having an on-site raid SSH/rsync server with mirroring (which satisfies two or more of the three copies) and also using the cloud. That satisfies the whole thing with added benefits, as far as I’m concerned; it’s a lot more convenient than using multiple physical media that you have to connect to your computer every time you back up, and rsync is a very efficient way to back up files, since it only transmits what’s been changed, not the entirety of files that already exist in the backup.

Don’t for the love of god become the next victim of google’s digital plutocracy, and don’t for the love of god lose your only pictures of your loved ones or your life’s work in a house fire.

[novella-november]

Media Preservation Monday

Yeah, yeah, as of this original post it's actually only Wednesday but hey, take this as a sign to take some initiative, and keep to it each Monday at minimum if you're actively writing!

What's Media Preservation Monday, you may ask?

MPM is your reminder to back up your writing at least three ways at least once a week or whenever you make major changes to your document(s).

Here's some incredibly easy ways to back up your writing:

One your Master Document(s), put a date on the file name, and every day you make changes, "Save As" the Document and change the date. Do this every time or day you make major changes.

Example: You start writing your Novella November Story on November 1st.

You name your master document "Novnov Project 11-01-2024"

The next day, you write some more, and at the end of your writing session, you go to save your document, and instead of simply hitting "Save" you choose "Save As" and save the new copy of the Document as "Novnov Project 11-02-2024".

You now have two copies of your project, and if you keep this up throughout the whole month, you will have a live snapshot of your writing progress.

Each day or after each major writing session, open up the folder containing your document, and back it up. The Easiest and simplest way to do this is to simply email it to yourself, but you can also create multiple backups by:

Save a copy of your dated Master Document(s) to different locations on your Hard-drive, to an external hard-drive, to a thumbdrive, etc.

If you're writing offline on a writing program like Libreoffice, upload a copy of your Master Document(s) to your preffered Cloud-based Writing Program of your choice.

Vice Versa: if you write on a Cloud-based writing program, download it to various offline-based locations.

Download the base document as well as download it as various ebook formats and send them to your ebook library on your phone or kindle or nook or reading app.

Make a personal discord server and upload the document/epub form of your Master Document(s) there [this is also a good way of making a kind of personal journal / diary etc]

Whatever you do, do not be complacent and assume nothing can happen to your writing. Back it up. Preserve it.

Don't have all of your hard work go down the drain because of one tiny unforeseen accident.

When it comes time to clean up your hardrive, always assume you don't have it backed up. Before deleting anything always take the time to copy it over to another physical drive or a cloud drive.

[ann-chovi]

Drawing tablet recommendations?

Okay, so my trusty old Galaxy Tab S3 that I've been working on exclusively since 2018 is... well, it's getting on in years. The battery life is starting to drain a LOT faster than it used to- it lags despite my system clean-up attempts, and the only art program I CAN run on it (medibang paint) has gotten so utterly bogged down by ads and paywalled tools that it's just getting frustrating to use.

I'm thinking it MIGHT finally be time for an upgrade- something that can run CSP maybe, and something with HIGH pressure sensitivity in the stylus (i draw light and prefer my lines to reflect that)

Does anyone have any affordable recs? I'd prefer a screen tablet that I can carry around with me. I hear mixed reviews about Huion, but the same can be said for Wacom, so I'd love to hear from fellow artists on preferences.

[i-draw-you-wont-see-it]

Waiting on a Date

[vintage-tech]

Two entirely different models of Iomega Ditto drives (800mb and 2gb) but they did their best to make the box art identical. Right down to the pen, the Windows version supported banner insert, and the placement of the three cartridges.

[theinfinitedivides]

'now you. you're different. you fight like something's trying to get out of you.' read for filth?????????? possibly read for filth by the mark?????????? Eliot?????????

[hua-fei-hua]

bill gates personally shut down my computer for his stupid unwanted windows updates WITHOUT WARNING ME when i was over FIFTY-NINE GIGABYTES DEEP into ATTEMPT NUMBER SEVEN of downloading my export of this blog and for that THE MAN WILL PAY DEARLY

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

Un-augmented Julian Bashir who programs a special button on his AAC device just for talking to Garak. It makes a loud incorrect buzzer noise.

[touteytout]

shes reading...

[lorillee]

kind of came up in a discussion with one of my classmates and now im curious. for anybody who majored/is majoring in a humanities, if you were forced to have a stem major instead what would it be? and of course vice versa. feel free to share your reasoning and also your current/existing major as well

[getvalentined]

A super fun commission I've been working on for the past several weeks! This is the piece that I lost multiple hours of work on due to power outages enough times to give me a full-on emotional breakdown, and I hope seeing it indicates why that was the case.

This is @poeticphoenix's take on postcanon Genesis, which turns out is almost identical to my take on postcanon Genesis, so this was a super fun project to work on.

Okay one of his legs was bugging me so please reblog this one actually.

[revvethasmythh]

sorry if this is weird but everything I learn about your laptop is increasingly more fascinating. it charges when it wants to. it almost melted the battery that one time. it can run bg3 because you really believed it could. it has multiple operating systems installed. gifted kid approaching burnout ass laptop

anon would you believe me if i told you that every piece of tech i own only runs because i believe it will. i show my stuff to other people and they're like "this shouldn't work" and i'm like "but it does" and they're like "no this should NOT work" and i'm like actually faith trust and pixie dust can do a lot if you really, really believe in it and then people give up trying to figure out what's going on with my stuff.

but to be fair, i DO have a new computer now. I still have that old one, actually, with a new battery after the last one almost exploded--and it still plays bg3! not well, but it does!--and my new computer plays bg3 better than my old one despite the fact that it still, uh, should not probably play that game at all. but it does. because i really believe it can.

the battery on the new computer still only charges when it wants to though LMFAO

[vinelark]

okay, super random/specific question, but reddit is failing me and someone here might know: the last time i got a new phone, my epub library in the ios books app automatically transferred over and i was able to just download and open my old ones on my new device. i just noticed that this time, while i can see them all there in my library/collections, nothing happens when i click download/i can’t open them. i can’t open the epubs from my phone’s files either, even though i see them all there. (basically any fic epubs i’ve downloaded since getting the new phone work fine, but anything from before that won’t open despite still being in my phone’s files and books library.)

i would love to not have to re-build my epub library from scratch. does anyone know if there’s something i’m missing this time that’s rendering the files unopenable?

edit: issue resolved in replies! (that said, i’m still going to build a backup archive just in case.)

[maticide666]

[id: an apple watch with text on its screen edited to say "apple watch detected heart rate that rose above 120 BPM while you appeared to finally see Time II be released". end id] id courtesy of @flower-crow

sequel to this meme

[simplyghosting]

Welp. My computer OS is too old to update firefox so now all of my add-ons are disabled and.LISTEN. I have not been without adblocker in YEARS. I am living in nightmare world right now.

[mechahero]

//I think about this off and on sometimes but the idea of Lambda referring to himself as a something sometimes and not a someone and not quite catching himself before it can slip out.