Back up your data folks

NightPorter

Really Experienced
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Dec 29, 2015
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Fell asleep watching a youtube documentary, woke up several hours later to find my computer in the BIOS. M.2 drive died in the night and the computer restarted and booted into the BIOS. Lost everything. My entire Lit folder. Several in development projects, months of work and hundreds of thousands of words gone.

Back up your data folks. So you're not like me, trying to reconstruct stories from memories. Essentially starting from scratch with a vague outline in your head.
 
Fell asleep watching a youtube documentary, woke up several hours later to find my computer in the BIOS. M.2 drive died in the night and the computer restarted and booted into the BIOS. Lost everything. My entire Lit folder. Several in development projects, months of work and hundreds of thousands of words gone.

Back up your data folks. So you're not like me, trying to reconstruct stories from memories. Essentially starting from scratch with a vague outline in your head.
A few years back my desktop crashed. I bought a new one at Staples and their techies were able to retrieve everything I'd lost and install it on the new one. I've got an external hard drive now, just in case. And I always make sure to save everything before I turn it off.
 
Two(+) things:

1. Your data can almost certainly be retrieved. The process might not be fun or easy, but can almost certainly be successful.
2. Don't friggin' back up your files. Instead, make sure your files are automatically backed up to the cloud, so it'll never depend on the health of your friggin' C: drive. Every significant word processing program will do this for you (by default!) automatically. Even friggin' MS Word in friggin' MS Windows.

Yes, I have lost files I was working on. It was beyond maddening each time it happened, but each time I took the trouble to reconstruct what I'd lost, I like to think that the result was better than what I wrote the first time. It helped (a little) to think of it as a step in the editing process. I was fortunate that it never took more than 3-4 hours to reconstruct what I'd written, and my infrastructure choices have ensured that I haven't lost anything in more than a decade. Knock wood. Call that thing #3, then bite the bullet and get 'r done. Welcome to the 21st century.
 
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Been there. It was well over 10 years ago. Hard drive crashed. I lost a story on it that I lost. It was my first erotic story, and later I recalled enough of it from memory to write and publish Nude Day Running Adventure.

I back up most things in the Cloud now but for my erotic work I prefer multiple back up hard drives.
 
My main takeaway from this is that if you leave it unattended, Youtube will destroy your hard drive.

Don't sleep on this.
 
No reason to ever use a cloud for backup. Just keep two drives and copy data from one to the other. No one else ever has to see your data. Especially in these times when any day your porn could make you a criminal with the stroke of a pen.

There is no excuse for not keeping your own backups. There is even software to automatically do it for you. Personally, I don't have a ton of data. Every couple of weeks I copy it all from one drive to the other. My drive died a few months back, so right now I just copy to USB and I can take it to work with my laptop once in a while to work in my breaks. Super easy.
 
I back up most things in the Cloud now but for my erotic work I prefer multiple back up hard drives.
What I didn't know, until a solid state drive shat itself and started to corrupt data, is there's a thing known as bit rot. Which is when an old hard drive randomly corrupts data. Unfortunately, the makers who spruiked those drives ten years ago didn't know that, or if they did, forgot to tell users.

Turns out an old mechanical spinning disk is more reliable, because when you defrag files, they rewrite themselves, thus keeping those bits alive.

I've lost ten years worth of data twice now, and the most reliable archive is the paper copy I made. Those old four ring binders, keep 'em.

Losing all that old data also taught me something - fuck it, it wasn't important anyway.
 
proton mail + proton drive are free, anonymous, and don't require giving Google a DNA sample to access them if the phase of the moon changes.

All my works in progress live in Proton drive and I sync every day after I've tinkered a bit.
 
My sympathy, really.
I use:
NAS storage (ZFS any 2 from 4 physical drive failures should be OK). Automatic daily incremental and weekly full.
Separate HD only connected for full backups, done weekly or so.
Most used files in cloud on Onedrive, synchronise automatically.

Any backup is not complete until you have tested the restore. (Last tested two nights ago.)

A free utility called Clear Disk Info - https://www.carifred.com/cleardiskinfo/ - does show diagnostics about SSD drives, including likely failures. I have not had one fail yet, so I don't know how good it is at predicting failures. YMMV.
 
What I didn't know, until a solid state drive shat itself and started to corrupt data, is there's a thing known as bit rot. Which is when an old hard drive randomly corrupts data. Unfortunately, the makers who spruiked those drives ten years ago didn't know that, or if they did, forgot to tell users.

Turns out an old mechanical spinning disk is more reliable, because when you defrag files, they rewrite themselves, thus keeping those bits alive.

I've lost ten years worth of data twice now, and the most reliable archive is the paper copy I made. Those old four ring binders, keep 'em.

Losing all that old data also taught me something - fuck it, it wasn't important anyway.

I'm aware of that, so I buy new backup drives every once in a while and re-back everything up.
But that's not a bad idea -- the paper copy. I've never seen any of my erotic writing on paper. It would be interesting for my heirs to find it after I'm gone, that's certain.
 
I'm aware of that, so I buy new backup drives every once in a while and re-back everything up.
But that's not a bad idea -- the paper copy. I've never seen any of my erotic writing on paper. It would be interesting for my heirs to find it after I'm gone, that's certain.
To be fair, the data I'm referring to relates to a hobby business I've been running for twenty years, with custom vacuum tube electronics, so it's schematics mostly, and one-off build notes. It's got to the point where people contact me, after finding equipment in some dead guy's estate. Did I make that? What was I thinking?!

I do have five books of my erotica sitting on a bookshelf - the kids might wonder, who is A.A.Cain, unless I bin them on my death bed.
 
For those with paper copies stored at home, fires love paper. If your home happens to be in an area prone to violent wind storms, papers fly quite well and for long distances. Would neighbors and rescue workers be entertained, or appalled?


Spinning drives could fail suddenly, but could often be read by another machine and data recovered. I had a brand of SSD a few years back that just flat quit, nothing. File size went from several hundred Mb to a few Kb. Turns out that brand had a substantial known failure rate for certain models and serial numbers.

I have no idea if NVME drive can be recovered or not, but this MiniPC has one. I added an SSD in the second drive bay and try to keep stuff there. It also has three USB drives available.
 
Would neighbors and rescue workers be entertained, or appalled?
I would expect them to return said papers with corrections in red ink and suggestions in purple ink, and I would judge them in a positively Dutch manner if they failed in either of these simple asks.

Edit: accurate estimates of deciliters of tears shed would be required in cyan, if supplied. I would not require estimations of other... ahem... liquid production levels.
 
Automatic backup to external media is your friend. All the major operating systems support software that does this.

As to the offsite recommendations... okay, but for two things: 1) by far most lost data episodes are due to hardware or software failure at the local level (local = your computer!). Safeguarding against calamities (fire, flood, angry ex-spouses) is extra work with little payoff - you have other, bigger problems; 2) cloud services subject your backups to the EULA, which change, and specific to LitE topics, that new EULA may well include that their site may not be used for "obscene" material. Changes in terms-of-service have occurred that left user data stranded, Photobucket's 2017 fiasco being the poster child for this.

Much of my career was in supervising large document preparation operations. The lessons learned were first, yes, backup, but don't go crazy with it - I ran calculations that determined our multiple backup schemes were consuming 30% of department resources yet rarely used, and recovery from backup usually took longer than just rekeying. Second is that offsite protocols are not worth the time and effort; like I said above if your only recovery is from offsite, then you have much bigger issues to deal with.
 
The standard I learned early on and still try to stick to was 432: four backups, in three locations, on two different formats. For me:

Google Drive
Dropbox
Local Word docs also copied onto a USB stick
 
Spinning drives could fail suddenly, but could often be read by another machine and data recovered.

I had a spinning drive fail a few years back (I've had several) and I paid 200 bucks to find out that it was not recoverable. However, the last one that failed only the boot sector quit and I was able to install a new boot drive and copy out the data myself. Had to get my brother to talk me through it though.
 
if your only recovery is from offsite, then you have much bigger issues to deal with
So big that you won't ever want to recover stuff from the offsite backup?

In your case, maybe: The business would probably no longer be a going concern. But for individuals and personal data, "offsite protocols" almost certainly are worth the time and effort. We still have a life after our house burns down.
 
Fell asleep watching a youtube documentary, woke up several hours later to find my computer in the BIOS. M.2 drive died in the night and the computer restarted and booted into the BIOS. Lost everything. My entire Lit folder. Several in development projects, months of work and hundreds of thousands of words gone.

Back up your data folks. So you're not like me, trying to reconstruct stories from memories. Essentially starting from scratch with a vague outline in your head.

My friend, welcome to the club of writers and authors who lost everything due to the fragile nature of digital data. I remember it was eleven or twelve years ago in which I lost everything that I wrote so far, which was my beginnings as a writer, thanks to a ransomware attack (back then ransomwares weren't too mainstream so I didn't know what it was until the end of the decade). Most recently, I lost my NaNoWriMo for 2021, which was a sequel to the one of the previous year, and I lost it just one week after finishing it due to a faulty hard drive that decided to stop working in that moment (and I blame Windows on it, hence I've been using Linux as my daily driver since then), and I nearly lost everything that I wrote if I hadn't have my backup, but some eroticas meant to publish here at one point got lost forever. Thankfully, because I sent some to my ex, she managed to get those back for me. At that point I made a vow to never go back into writing if I lose everything again.

Thus I now have everything backed up on three different USB drives, and a few Markdown files on my phone. I also have handwritten stuff, which is harder to destroy since paper is mostly vulnerable to fire. Suffice to say, those who suffered this... we feel you. Welcome to the club.
 
I'm certainly not a tech expert, but I'm also not tech illiterate either. So I can confidently say, that drive is fucked.

The little metal heat shield stickers was visibly discolored when I removed it from the my computer. Like it overheated. Which doesn't make sense since I wasn't doing anything demanding when it failed. Drive is recognized in the bios but not recognized by windows. Can't even scan it. Diskpart in the command prompt won't even load if I have that drive connected and three third party programs all freeze if I try and discover that drive.

I'm writing it off and learning from this. I won't use offsite backup for privacy concerns but two separate hard drives and a usb should do the trick.

Also... don't buy cheap ssd's because you saw an amazon sale and you blew your whole paycheck on the graphics card.
 
Drive is recognized in the bios but not recognized by windows.
This means the disk isn’t completely hosed. You could try booting up Linux from a USB stick and see if you can mount it. If you can’t, then I’d try ddrescue to at least copy as much raw bytes as possible, so you can then search through it to see if anything interesting is there.
 
I won't use offsite backup for privacy concerns
A cloud storage provider should be fine to use if you choose one that has ‘zero knowledge’ of you files – meaning your files are encrypted locally on you machine before uploading them to the cloud (and also, the provider doesn’t know your encryption key).

I use Mega.io but there are others to choose from.

If you reside in the US and write gay or transgender stories, then you may want to ‘double encrypt’ your files for additional protection. You could create an ‘encrypted volume’ for your documents (a file for storing other files and directories, a bit like a Zip archive or .ISO image). then keep a copy of the volume on a cloud storage provider. I use TrueCrypt (Windows/macOS/Linux) for full-disk and volume-based encryption.

However, if the FBI want to pursue a transgender pogrom they will likely subpoena Literotica’s server logs. That will tell them the source IP address of the users uploading content that they’ve deemed prohibited. Literotica, being US-based, is now a greater risk than some European or Canadian cloud provider ratting you out.
 
Fell asleep watching a youtube documentary, woke up several hours later to find my computer in the BIOS. M.2 drive died in the night and the computer restarted and booted into the BIOS. Lost everything. My entire Lit folder. Several in development projects, months of work and hundreds of thousands of words gone.

Back up your data folks. So you're not like me, trying to reconstruct stories from memories. Essentially starting from scratch with a vague outline in your head.
Oh no, that’s a nightmare! Losing all that work must be devastating. Seriously, this is a wake-up call for everyone, back up your data like your creative life depends on it (because it does!). Cloud storage, external drives, whatever works.

Starting from scratch is rough, but you’ve got the bones of those stories in your head. You’ll rebuild, and maybe even make them better this time around.
 
For those with paper copies stored at home, fires love paper. If your home happens to be in an area prone to violent wind storms, papers fly quite well and for long distances. Would neighbors and rescue workers be entertained, or appalled?


Spinning drives could fail suddenly, but could often be read by another machine and data recovered. I had a brand of SSD a few years back that just flat quit, nothing. File size went from several hundred Mb to a few Kb. Turns out that brand had a substantial known failure rate for certain models and serial numbers.

I have no idea if NVME drive can be recovered or not, but this MiniPC has one. I added an SSD in the second drive bay and try to keep stuff there. It also has three USB drives available.
Paper burns, drives fail, and storms scatter, no storage method is foolproof. Cloud backups, external drives, and even printing important stuff (stored safely) can save you from total disaster.

NVME drives can be tricky to recover, but it’s not impossible. Still, prevention is way easier than recovery. Sounds like you’ve got a good setup with the SSD and USB drives, just keep that backup routine tight.
 
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