Scare of the century!

[Summer-Knight925]

This could probably go in story telling, but I'd like to leave it open for others to rant.

So last night, I fell asleep on the couch, with my laptop next to me. This morning I woke up, and I didn't respond, so I figured the battery died. I plugged it in, and it still didn't respond.


Then it hit me.
I fell asleep on the couch....it couldn't cool down, could I have just...fried my mother board?

I spent three hours reading on the big computer, making calls, getting appraisals on how much it would cost me.
Finally I was getting ready to pick it up to take it somewhere, and they had requested I take the battery out if possible.
So I did.
And I pressed the power button one last time, for I had tried to start it without the battery before, but still no response.
But not this time, despite the confusing wording of the past statement, it had turned on.

It was only a dead battery and a few natural 1 rolls on my part.


So why was this a big deal?


For the past 6 months I have been working on a table top, I am not editing it and fixing the way things are worded to make it easier to understand.
I thought I had just lost it all.

I have tried my hand at writing before, but always get bogged down in the mechanics and making it all balanced, fair, and easy.
But I did it, I finished it.
And then, all of that was threatened.



Anyone else have a scare like this?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Many years ago, in HS, I had a biiiig paper in Emperor Justinian to do, due the next day. I had just saved my data to my 5" floppy (remember those?) for the umpteenth and started to do my final proofread before printing. DISASTER!!! Every letter "j" in the paper had been changed into a nonsense symbol. I retrieved my saved copy...and apparently, it had gone nuts just as I was saving my data! I had to proofread that 10pg paper word by word to find all the instances of that letter and come up with synonyms. I also had to write an explanation of why I only referred to Justinian as "The Emperor." Took hours.

Since then, I have lost data to a Mac virus downloaded by one of my cousins playing on my machine- talk about dumb luck- and other data lost because Microsoft decided not to offer a Mac upgrade to a program...nor a translation & import function for use with the program that supplanted it.

I even also nearly lost thousands of pages of data when my Palm Tungsten started to die.

 

[Kerberos1976]

A few months ago my external 2TB Hard Drive completely crapped out on me. Fortunately for me, none of the pictures accumulated over the last 10 years were on that drive. Almost all of it was replaceable so it wasn't a disaster, but a major inconvenience. It was at that point I realized though, that I wasn't backing up most of my important files and if they were lost, I was SOL. So I installed redundant drives and decided to start using Google Drive. That way, failure, destruction of my equipment (fire etc.) or theft, my files are still there. Might sound a little over kill, but 3 years of pictures of my kid are a bit of a big deal LOL.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

There are two types of hard drives: those that HAVE crashed and those that WILL. Learn it; know it; live it.

Yeah, I've lost irreplacable stuff that I've written for D&D both by computer theft and hard drive crash. For the latter I blame only myself. I have learned that hard drives crash. I know that they all eventually will. Still I am lazy enough to live as if new hard drives will work perfectly FOREVER and I occasionally get punished for it.

Hard drives these days of sufficient size to back up not just documents but music and photos are not expensive. Software to backup your stuff ABOUNDS. Windows will pester you to do so endlessly. You may not even need a hard drive as today we have Dropbox, Imageshack, iCloud...

I'd love to blame Bill Gates and Western Digital, but really it's just us, the users.

 

[Herobizkit]

Get dat Google Docs/Vault, man. Save your life.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

What made it so scary was that I was JUST about to begin editing the rule's wording so it would make sense.

I finished an entire system's mechanics
AND IT ALMOST WAS ALL GONE

I'd have been so depressed.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I JUST lost some photos emailing them from my "smart" phone to my computer at home.

As per usual, I selected the photos to be sent, selected the gmail account to send them, and sent them. This time, I decided to delete the photos after sending.

When I got the emails at home, some of the messages were devoid of photos. So they're just gone.

Yes, I am complicit, but in my defense, doing the same action should have resulted in the same results.

 

[gamerprinter]

Not including software, but every file I create exists in my laptop, in one of 3 jump drives and on 2 desktop computers at 2 different locations. Not that hardware hasn't died on me at one time or another, but I'm not so unprepared as to have files only on one device. Because of my precautions, no, this has never happened to me, nor do I expect it ever would. I've had this practice of multiple file savings across multiple devices for at least 25 years.

 

[Scott DeWar]

not a computer thing, and I talk of this a lot, but i went in the hospital and 6 or 7 weeks later: waking up from being in a coma a year ago.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

not a computer thing, and I talk of this a lot, but i went in the hospital and 6 or 7 weeks later: waking up from being in a coma a year ago.

Topper!