I would type LOL but today’s adventure in computer technology was potentially not funny. This morning the editor of an academic journal we edit asked if I still had last year’s bureaucratic paperwork, a PDF time-suck that one has to fill in every. single. goddamn. year. So I go over to DropBox to retrieve the same from the journal’s “GDU Paperwork” subdirectory.
Empty.
Huh?
I start looking in the other subdirectories. “Style Guides”: Empty.
Holy sh!t. I just posted edits for FOUR full-length scholarly articles in that folder! I was in the “Style Guides” subdirectory yesterday, because the journal has a wacky mark-up system that we have to look up and study every time we work on a new issue, and the files were in there as of about 7:00 last night.
Mercifully, the edited articles were still there. I had backed up that DropBox folder to my hard disk some time back, and so the two endless, pointlessly complicated style guides were saved to the laptop. But after two days of plowing through academicese, much of it in Spanglish, I was so glad to be done that I thought nothing of posting the stuff to the editors on DropBox and stumbling away.
Madly copied the surviving files to the hard disk.
Now I’ll have to back up the laptop’s hard disk again. That takes awhile: there are over 18,000 files in the two directories I use all the time. Shee-ut. Just did that a couple days ago.
Well, it’ll have to run while I’m chasing around town today. Thanks to the mail thieves and the credit union’s clunky electronic deposit system, I now have to drive to a post office to pick up packages and to the credit union to deposit checks.
Almost $2,000 worth of Copyeditor’s Desk checks are now in hand, so those need to be schlepped up to the CU. That will keep the publishing business going a little longer, anyway. 😀
Always back everything up. An automatic online back-up such as Carbonite is ideal. Since I try to minimize the endless monthly charges — about the only way to survive on a fixed, limited income — I use Apple’s “Time Machine,” which is built into a Mac and requires only an external hard drive.
The one I have is attached to the desktop, which means anything on DropBox is being backed up automatically. But I need to get a back-up drive for the laptop…another complicated decision I don’t feel like having to figure out and another involved digital task I don’t wanna do.
Don’t computers improve our lives…
This is a test…
My design has a two-layered backup system for our personal data, where we backup from each device, then backup those devices as well. Right now it’s not fully in place, and I’d also like to add an offline element.
How did things get emptied out on Dropbox? User error or did they actually come up missing on stuff you’d put there?
Yah, that’s pretty much what I’ve got going, too, especially where the laptop is concerned — I haven’t figured out whether plugging and unplugging it into an external drive will bollix up Time Machine. Guess I should go over to the Apple store and ask someone.
As for DB, the only reasonable explanation is user error. If it had been hacked, everything would be gone, not just one sub-sub-folder. What that error was, I can’t imagine… I was very tired by 8:00 last night, having read ALL the main editorial content of Chicana/Latina Studies and converted six single-spaced typeset pages of LaTexed Chinglish mathematics copy into English. In that state, I could have done anything.