NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

My laptop has gotten horrible these last few months--the battery life has gone from 3 hours to 3 minutes, the AC cord messed up. and somehow it's gotten slower. No worries yet--it's behaving now, and my cool 25K is on two flash drives.

I had a massive meltdown (followed by a mental meltdown) but I'm almost back on schedule and I expect that I may by the end of today be ahead of the game again.

yep...had my power supply fry the night before nano..thankfully we have a backup computer. Lost all research but thankfully most of it is still in my head.

Ric

I am a Nanowrimo Newbie. I decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it up right. So on November 1st, I wrote my first 1,670 words and on November 2nd I repeated the effort and then some. Saved it on the lap top. As I went into Nano to update my numbers, WHAM, hit by a nasty virus. All my work - gone! I'm feeling defeated, but not defeeted. I shall persevere.

My keyboard died today (space bar stopped working, which is REALLY important in making the novel more than one long word). I had to quit writing and run out and buy a new one.

googledocs, baby, googledocs.

I have a mac and do use Time Machine (sometimes--I just never seem to have my laptop in my office). What I ended up subscribing to was Carbonite. It is backing me up wirelessly all the time. Because I have a huge harddrive, I opted to only back up the things I can't live without--photos, client work and writing. I figure, even backing up on an external won't help me if the house burns down.

I think Carbonite was very reasonably priced--50$ a year, + a discount coupon I found online, + another discount for a 2-year contract. I also like that I can access the site and files from a remote computer. So I can save my novel at home and access it from my parents' house.

Not on commission from Carbonite--I know there are some other ones out there--but this has been a great peace of mind for me.

Owning a Mac does NOT guarantee you won't crash. If you truly believe you have nothing to worry about simply because you bought a Mac, I genuinely fear for your novel - PLEASE back it up, no matter what OS you're running.

Sadly, my laptop died on exactly the 1st of November. It's barely six months old and it hates me already. Ah well, luckily I managed to back up my story on a USB.
Well, half of it at any rate.

yeah, it just happened to me too! my iTunes decided to delete my playlist and i spent countless hours (that i could have been writing) manually reinstalling every single song i own... that's over 5000+! arrrrrgh!

Macs use the exact same hard drives as PCs.

oh you should have fears! My macbook spontaneously died for no apparent reason a few months ago, after just 2 years of (gentle) use. Yeah, so it does happen. I have a new mac now but am much more careful to back up ALL THE TIME!!!

I experienced one of those sad little meltdowns in NaNo 2008 - my first year doing NaNo. It died the second week, and I just reached 15,000 words. I now back up my work religiously. I now have a new laptop, I've been using it since April and did Script Frenzy and everything, it's been on almost constantly since then, yep, it's a brave little trooper... that is as long as it gets through NaNo! LOL

~KittyNadem

My computer won't charge and completely died 2 days in. I had to resort to handwriting and counting. Now That's what I wanna do!

My brand new wireless laser mouse died leaving me to find my old rolly-ball giant-corded mouse. It doesn't work well.

The other flipside to utilizing Google Documents is that when I find myself with extra time at school and access to the computer labs, Google Documents means I can edit whenever and where ever I have a good connection.

My second NaNo I lost 30K+ words. I was crushed and there was NO way to get it all back. That laptop was later taken to the shooting range and disposed of in a most violent way.

Since then I have been reminding my home region to back up their work any way they can. I promote gmail to everyone. I keep one gmail account for just my writing. The end of each day I email the file to myself. That way it's saved some place outside my house and I no longer have to worry about it. I always know I can hunt down a piece of writing - file my writing according to story and chapter - whenever I might need it. So even if I end up on another computer I can pull up my work and continue without losing one bit of it.

I had my macbook crap out on me last year. It wasn't a software problem, which is safe not to worry about in a mac, but instead a physical hard drive failure, and hard drives don't care what OS you're running: if it's time to go, it's time to go.

The netbook I purchased exclusively for Nano on an airplane failed 3 days before Nano with bad clusters on the hard drive taking with it a few days of outlining. Dropbox.com is my new friend. Why didn't you find me sooner, Dropbox!

I've had problems in the past with techie stuff during nanowrimo. My wife in fact lost her entire novel a couple years ago. Both computers that it was opened on are fine, perfectly healthy. The file is just poof-gone. The only thing we could retrieve was the excerpt from this site.

As for me, I write in three locations without a decent laptop so I'm emailing my novel to myself at least once a day. No major losses for me this month!

I have no fears...

I own a MAC.

Sheri

Yeah, the destruction is coming early this year. My laptop charger cable's wires got frayed and destroyed last night. LOVELY.

I'm just glad my mother has a laptop too for me to use. Hopefully it'll work just as nicely as mine. And hopefully I'll be getting a new charger ASAP.

SOMETHING happened to my desktop Fri night. Not a crash, but cannot get monitor to work with the computer. monitor works fine with my laptop. Surge protector fine, CPU SEEMS to be fine. All of this happened when I tried to hook up a wireless network.

Off to the computer hospital, sigh.

At least it happened now and not NEXT week!

I just read this post this morning and was thinking thank god nothing's happened to my machine so far.

Well, nothing's happened to the evil writing machine so far (knock on wood) but believe it or not, the light in my room died.

I've only got that one light in my room, I don't know when I can get someone to come over and change it (I can't reach so high up myself) - so I might just end up doing my first ever NaNo in total darkness.

I'm now thoroughly convinced there's some sort of NaNo-electronics jinx here!

I'll be doing my writing primarily on my netbook (ostensibly it's what I bought it for) using bzr for version control (for when I really want that passage back I deleted two days ago), constant backups to the desktop (which I'll use for secondary writing when I need the whole 3840x1080 display), which in turn sends daily and weekly snapshots of all my data to my off-site server.

And the shiny new Ubuntu has 2GB of cloud storage integrated quite nicely with Ubuntu One, so I'll throw backups on there as well.

Call me paranoid, but even with my years of scheming and lost drives, just had a hard drive die back in September. Lost two months of work ripping CDs to FLAC. Remember the Maxtor!

Also, backup off-site!

I had a Near Death Experience... well, the battery on my netbook did, anyway! A week to NaNo and the thing suddenly decides that it can't hold a charge! Fortunately, I found some tips online for tricking it into starting to charge again, and one of those worked.

I'm buying a spare battery for November anyway, though. My very best writing time is on the train to and from work, and I'm not risking it.

I completely sympathize with you, Chris. I had THREE hard drive failures, a power cord failure, and I had to have my motherboard replaced - all in the first SIX MONTHS of having my over=priced Dell laptop. Well, that was last year and I am now writing to you on my beautiful shiny Mac computer. I wouldn't recommend a Dell computer to anyone!

I am hoping that yours will at least have a longer life than my worthless ($2200 at purchase, probably about $50 today) laptop.

Cheers!
Holli

Oh my goodness, an update went horribly wrong and completely crashed my entire computer. I lost everything, all my older writing, all my works in progress, even my virus protection suite, my Internet drivers, and my Microsoft Office Suite. I am rather fortunate that it happened this weekend and not next weekend though, at least I have a week to get everything up and running again. This may actually be a blessing in disguise because I don't have nearly as many distractions now. ;)

My backup strategy is email-based. Since gmail keeps all of my correspondence, I send my story and notes AT LEAST daily to my account on gmail. I have a filter that automatically filters my mail by assigning it a label based on my subject line. Everything this year will end up labeled NaNoWriMo2009.

Any email solution is likely to work, and since the email is backed up on someone else's servers, you're set if your machine goes down. I usually send it to two difference email services (in my case, gmail and MobileMe), which increases the reliability.

Ouch, that sucks... my mum's laptop's HDD has just died too, it's also a Dell. Considering mine is only 5 months younger and I use it a lot more, it's probably only a matter of time... I shall be backing up regularly throughout November and moving everything over to my new netbook when I get it, I backed up all my character bios to my flash drive last night so luckily they're all safe.

My first NaNoWriMo. I finished a few days early & thankfully uploaded my content & snagged my happy little banner. Less than 24 hours later my laptop seized & died. It wasn't pretty. There were tears, words not to be used in polite company & contemplation of praying to any possible cosmic entity that could care about such things as data retrieval & corrupt files. A speedy trip to MacMedics found that my HD had indeed died (the one & only Mac I've had flake out on me, insane!). I got a new HD & all was well but I never could remember my favorite scene of my Nanovel. It was the best romantic scene I've ever written & now it's somewhere in the cosmic ether. I was pretty annoyed about that for a good year but now that I back up, nothing has died, so I guess that's something. I still don't like to think too much on Nano 2005. Bittersweet indeed.

Back it up peeps. Twice & on the regs.

yup. Just today. Not sure what I can do about it other than take it to the local "fix it while a tech looks over your shoulder" tomorrow. And pray that I can pull stuff off the hard drive if it's totally fried.

Ugh! My computer is working at the moment (slow as molasses, but working) but my iPod is being sent out for repair tomorrow.

The power cord for my laptop always seems to stop working around the last week of October. So rather than getting a cheaper one from the people who made my laptop (which generally takes several weeks to ship), I'm forced to get an expensive off-label one that will only last for another year.

Yes! I've been having computer problems ever since I got this stupid computer. >.

My laptop just died since my charger broke. I'm viewing this as a positive thing, though - less distraction from the internet during Nano... and I always wanted to write a novel by hand, anyways. :)

School computers will do fine for now, I'm in no rush.

Last year I used Googledocs for my novel. The entire thing was typed into Google's servers, which auto-saved every five minutes or so. I checked the other day, and I think there are around 1800 versions of my NaNovel saved from 2008, which is also very very handy for the times when you delete entire pages.

In August, I got myself a new small laptop for the express purpose of Nanoing. Should have known better, the hard disk was making clicking noises from the start, but it was only when whole directories started disappearing and I found several bad sector errors in the Windows event log (that was last month) I realized the disk had to be replaced, or else. So, sometimes even new gear isn't safe...

Just wanted to point out that Applecare will only cover you for hardware failure, won't cover you if damage it (ie. drop it from a skyscraper or fling it into water).

Having lived through a total of 4 harddrive meltdowns, with surprisingly little writing lost (thanks to good luck on my backup timing) I now have a nearly bulletproof backup system *knock on wood*:

1) My writing is kept on a RAID 1 system in my PC, so it's actually on two different physical harddrives.

2) Everyday a backup copy is made to a different place on one of those harddrives (I keep 3 days worth of these stored at all times)

3) Encrypted backups are FTPed to my own fileserver, and to non-public serverspace I have with my ISP every night.

4) During NaNoWriMo I usually setup a script to have my NaNo-project encrypted and FTPed to my fileserver & ISP every hour.

The only thing I'm still looking to add to the mix is a second off-site server to FTP the stuff to, so I'll lose the 30 minutes or so of vulnerability I have now while the remote update is actually in progress.

I plan on emailing the doc at select intervals (probably at the end of a day of writing) to my Yahoo mail account. That way I can access the latest drafts whether I used my work desktop or my home laptop.. I hope.

I got a new Dell laptop last September, and it just received its THIRD new hard drive put in right before the year warranty expired. I want to love it, I really do (and I do definitely love playing FreeCell on it), but I just can't bring myself to trust it.

NaNo will be written on my mom's handmedown MacBook, and backed up as often as I remember.

It sounds wrong to say, but I'm glad that your hard drive died now, and not two weeks from now.

My video card randomly crapped out a week ago. I was FURIOUS!!! I could handle a hard-drive breakdown- you cry, eat cookie dough, and move on with your life. But a video card? Knowing that all of your info is safe, retrievable, and that your computer itself is willing to get back to work as soon as Best Buy magnanimously decides to ship out the replacement from their warehouse? Oh, the angsty torture of waiting impatiently...

My hard-drive crashed about a week ago, luckily i've been keeping all my nano-novels and plot notes on flash drives since last year so no loss here, now my computer is back up and ready to novel!

I formatted my Dell laptop yesterday so I'm hoping that's gotten rid of all nasty bugs and other exploding creatures out of its system in time for NaNo!

In my former life as a computer tech at a large corporation, I encountered many hard drive failures. My first question to them was always "You did back up the important stuff didn't you?" Sadly, it frequently cost the company a lot of money to recover the data that is, if the powers that were considered it important enough.

That said, most computers nowadays have a CD burner and CD-Rs are cheap. Burn your novel to a CD at the end of your writing day. If you have a DVD burner, you can back up even more data. Then there are online data storage services as well.

I have an external hard drive that my computer does an automatic backup to every day.

I was worried this would happen to me if I kept my old laptop. It was only a matter of time, I felt, before the harddrive died. That's why I decided to get a new one in August. I SHOULD be safe but then, you never know. :/ I've already lost everything once. I have no desire for it to happen again!

I use Mozy - it's free, you get something like 4 GB, and you can just set it to "backup all .doc files" and it'll do it. I have mine set to backup whenever my laptop's been idle for five minutes (but no more than ten times a day...lol), but during NaNo I'll probably be manually hitting the backup button every night, just to make sure! Mozy has saved my ass about three times now. It's a godsend. I haven't tried Dropbox, though...

As for gadget meltdown...last time I did NaNo my spacebar fell off! Egads!

Lucky for me my mom's computer is the one that's got the virus. My laptop's turned out to be pretty tough. (*knocks on wood*)

I had a pentium that committed suicide one summer.
Didn't turn it on for three months, then when I tried to boot it up it gave me the dreaded error message-guess it died of loneliness!