12% of ebooks are self-published; most are rubbish, claims editor

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

I know an author who lost her hard drive and her entire book (third in a series.)

Astounding to think that anyone would write a book and place so little value on her work as to not make a backup.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Astounding to think that anyone would write a book and place so little value on her work as to not make a backup.

She had it backed up to a USB stick (or thought she did). Unfortunately, something went badly wrong and it was not recoverable. She's not very computer savvy so she took it to someone to try and get files off, but they were unable to get anything from the hard drive. I was never clear if the backups she thought she was doing never happened or if the USB stick was also corrupted (I am not sure if she understood it.)

She thought she was backing things up, but apparently it didn't work out. Reading those blog entries for the three weeks while she was trying to get the stuff recovered (and it's expensive to even have someone look) was...awful.

I don't even like when I lose an EMAIL because of some glitch...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

She had it backed up to a USB stick (or thought she did). Unfortunately, something went badly wrong and it was not recoverable. She's not very computer savvy so she took it to someone to try and get files off, but they were unable to get anything from the hard drive. I was never clear if the backups she thought she was doing never happened or if the USB stick was also corrupted (I am not sure if she understood it.)

She thought she was backing things up, but apparently it didn't work out. Reading those blog entries for the three weeks while she was trying to get the stuff recovered (and it's expensive to even have someone look) was...awful.

That's a very scary story, and a lesson to be learned: a backup is only a backup if you can restore stuff from it (try it to be sure).

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Astounding to think that anyone would write a book and place so little value on her work as to not make a backup.

Some people are so trusting, ignorant, uneducated (or whatever it is) with regard to computers and technology that they can't even begin to think that anything could go wrong.

You don't want to know how many people I know that have gigabytes of important data sitting on their hard drives or smartphones.... people that are NOT making any backups whatsoever, not even after I tell them.

I learned my lesson in 1996, writing a report for history class, in high school. I had an 80468DX/2 66MHz computer with a 400 MB hard drive. My previous computer had no hard drive, so I only used diskettes. Those broke down constantly, so I made many backups.

Therefore I also made many backups of important stuff that was on the hard drive... I expected it to break down and would need to be repaired or something. But it didn't. It worked, for 2 months... 3 months... a year... and I came to trust it and backups slackened.

Until after two years, the computer crashed and wouldn't boot and the BIOS wouldn't recognize a hard drive anymore.

My mom heard me use some words she didn't expect me to know. From that time onward, I make backups like some sort of obsessed freak. (I use an automated script for that now, and I always have two backups available, at least.)

The computer world only has two kinds of people in it.
1. The ones who make backups because of losing data in the past.
2. The ones who are going to learn to make backups because of losing data somewhere in the future.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The computer world only has two kinds of people in it.
1. The ones who make backups because of losing data in the past.
2. The ones who are going to learn to make backups because of losing data somewhere in the future.

And only two sorts of disks:

1. Those which have crashed.
2. Those which are about to crash.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

She had it backed up to a USB stick (or thought she did). Unfortunately, something went badly wrong and it was not recoverable. She's not very computer savvy...

I can't tell you how many people I have encountered that have had this problem.

"I backed up all my photo's, music.... and there's nothing on the DVD / HDD!"
- "Where were your pictures stored?"
"In Picasa."
- "No, I mean, where on the hard drive? Which folder?"
"Folder?..... What?"
- "Oh no... let me look at that DVD / HDD."

And what do I invariably find? Burned or copied shortcuts to Picasa, Winamp, Media Player, shortcuts pointing to folders on the now dead hard drive... such a Music folder shortcut that was on the desktop, that sort of thing.

It never occurs to those people that burning or copying multiple gigabytes of data (if they can understand the concept of "size of data" in the first place) should take longer than 2 seconds.

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by HarryT

And only two sorts of disks:

1. Those which have crashed.
2. Those which are about to crash.

And thee's two sorts of users:

1. Ignorant users that don't back up
2. Lazy users that don't back up

I tend to fall into the second group

[BearMountainBooks]

I'm pretty obsessive about backing up when I'm on projects. I'm not as good at doing the offsite backups as I should be. I think I'll work on that this week.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I can't tell you how many people I have encountered that have had this problem.

"I backed up all my photo's, music.... and there's nothing on the DVD / HDD!"
- "Where were your pictures stored?"
"In Picasa."
- "No, I mean, where on the hard drive? Which folder?"
"Folder?..... What?"
- "Oh no... let me look at that DVD / HDD."

And what do I invariably find? Burned or copied shortcuts to Picasa, Winamp, Media Player, shortcuts pointing to folders on the now dead hard drive... such a Music folder shortcut that was on the desktop, that sort of thing.

It never occurs to those people that burning or copying multiple gigabytes of data (if they can understand the concept of "size of data" in the first place) should take longer than 2 seconds.

I remember hearing a story from back in the old 'floppy' disk days. This secretary couldn't figure out why floppies she used in the computer weren't working right. The repair guy even took the drive to pieces in an effort to figure out what was wrong. Still, it didn't work right. So he had her go through the steps for him so he could see what she did.

1. Burn data to disk
2. Put label on disk
3. Roll disk into typewriter and type info on label
4. Take disk out of typewriter and put it into drive where it 'mysteriously' failed to read the data

[tompe]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

I'm pretty obsessive about backing up when I'm on projects. I'm not as good at doing the offsite backups as I should be. I think I'll work on that this week.

I use crashplan and dropbox for that. Very convenient.

[Katsunami]

LOL. The total amount of data of my ripped FLACs is so big that I can't even begin to think about such a service. Even if I could, I don't trust them. Oh, I have a dropbpx-account, all right, but it only contains save games to share with my notebook.

[BearMountainBooks]

We looked into those and just decided to burn copies of important stuff to CD and take it offsite. Not that they don't work or serve a purpose, but multiple copies never hurts especially when it's something that really can't be rewritten...

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

LOL. The total amount of data of my ripped FLACs is so big that I can't even begin to think about such a service. Even if I could, I don't trust them. Oh, I have a dropbpx-account, all right, but it only contains save games to share with my notebook.

I have about 3TB of data backed up with CrashPlan. It took a very long time for the initial backup (maybe six months), but then you are just backing up changes.

[Ken Maltby]

Hmm... six months to do your full backup, if you had a crash and needed to restore all your files, how long will it take to get them all back?

Luck;
Ken

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

LOL. The total amount of data of my ripped FLACs is so big that I can't even begin to think about such a service. Even if I could, I don't trust them. Oh, I have a dropbpx-account, all right, but it only contains save games to share with my notebook.

Why not. Crashplan havet unlimited data. I use them for big files and much data.