Thread "The Perils of Technology" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 8:06AM, Jun. 6, 2022

Had what I'm sure was a very relatable experience late last week.

I was attempting to finish a comic page ahead of the weekend (which is my normal work time) in order to have the time for a weekend off to go out. As I was working, I realized I needed to reference something from a previous page, so I went to open that page from the drive I had them saved to and suddenly started getting errors all over. I couldn't proceed with anything without repairing the drive. (Admittedly, this might not have been the proper response, but when you're in the moment and you don't know better you're just "Yes! Fix it!")
It only took a couple of minutes for the drive to repair, but when I opened it again, there were two files that were now just gone and the one I had been attempting to open was corrupted and could no longer be opened. (It can't be recognized as a photoshop document anymore so it just won't open at all.)
Poof, three week's worth of work, gone in a matter of minutes.

Luckily, when the errors first popped up, I had a sinking feeling it wasn't going to go well, so I saved the page I was working on to the desktop. This page ended up being one of the ones that was missing, so that's one of the three recovered.

As I was sitting there, feeling miserable at still losing two pages, I suddenly remembered that I had saved one of the pages as a copy in a separate place to be easier to access for reference purposes. So I checked, and yep! It was the other missing page! Saved by pure, dumb luck!

Still can't get the corrupted page to work despite trying a few things I looked up, so I think I'll have to re-do that one. Ordinarily, losing an entire completed page would be completely devastating, but now that it's one and not three, it's such a comparative relief that I feel a little less overwhelmed and the task feels do-able.

I've been working on my comics for…dear lord, 20 years now! And this happens periodically. I've lost work when the computer I had it saved on catastrophically failed. Luckily, I had friends who could help me recover most of the files, but it's not something you want to do a lot. Because of that I switched to mostly keeping files on multiple external drives (like, redundant copies so I have a backup) but this caused a problem too when I accidentally overwrote one of these drives before backing up the newest pages. I was able to recover some, but not all of the pages on that occasion.

Having done all the work just to have to go back to step one is a horrible feeling, and I always get that moment where I wonder if I should keep bothering…and then I just do. I suck it up, re-do the page, and move on, hopefully before having to miss an update.

Now that I've gotten out of the "woe-is-me" phase for this particular blunder, I want to experience the reassurance that everyone goes through stuff like this. What's your personal worst tech failure? Did you miss any updates? Did anything change on your re-do? Let's commiserate.

Posted at 9:06AM, Jun. 6, 2022

Big eek! I have no exciting tales to tell, but you did make me switch on an external USB drive and splat the last month's updates onto it. I used to rotate 3 drives plus numerous USB sticks, backing up every day as I made new stuff, it's easy to get distracted and neglect these things. And then some random component decides it's had enough.

Posted at 2:06PM, Jun. 6, 2022

Oh man this kind of stuff is absolutely the worst. I've had enough hard drive failures over the years that I kind of have a generally pretty foolproof system going at this point. I learned my lesson from having a drive get fried in a thunderstorm once, another just for no external reason I could figure out. In both cases I had copies of the files I needed in other places, but it was frustrating to lose an entire hard drive.

The worst scenario I had (which still occasionally reappears to haunt me) is this one period a few years ago where my main computer was dying a slow death, I was temporarily working off my husband's old laptop and had files there, and then I bought a new laptop to replace my dying machine. At the time I was kind of working at a breakneck pace so not everything got moved to the right place all at once, and it was a process of gathering up all the files and copying them into ONE place. I gave myself heart failure by misnaming a folder with all that work in it, so I thought that I had lost an entire chapter of pages, but I hadn't. Ugh.

Now I keep multiple, complete, well-labeled copies of absolutely everything.

I use a Mac, so the Time Machine software built in is pretty decent and has saved me more than once. I just have to remember to make a backup every now and then and that goes on a spare hard drive that just sits unplugged the rest of the time. I don't look at it, I don't breathe in its general direction, I pretend it's not there, if I'm not backing things up it doesn't exist.

I also generally work directly out of a folder in my iCloud Drive that has a master copy of all my layered comic files. I have yet to run into any issues with this system beyond occasionally having to wait for the sync to happen across devices, or if I'm going to be working somewhere offline I have to remember to make sure to download the files I want locally first. It's a paid subscription, but it's been worth every penny.

Posted at 5:06AM, Jun. 7, 2022

There's no way to be completely foolproof but you can take the odds right down with multiple copies and external drives, cloud saves etc…

Though as computers become better and better these days it's so easy to get complacent. I'm super complacent. I keep meaning to buy a nice big drive for backups but I never get around to it XD

–

I've lost work at times, usually due to wired issues and an actual honest to goodness virus on time! The whole virus thing is a massively overblown worry because you're WAY more likely to lose work due to hardware failure, OS, or program bugs or even the antivirus programs haha!
But this was one of those very rare times that the myth became reality. I STUPIDLY installed a cracked version of a DVD player and it zapped me before the antivirus program could do a thing. Completely my own fault.
It was tricky to eradicate it and get my stuff back but I did.

Back in the day Photoshop had a thing where it would randomly crash while you were working on it. I had a shortcut button assigned as save function and would save after every few minutes constantly.
I'm STILL in the habit of "ctrl+S" all the time whatever I'm working on.

Computers, software and drives are way more reliable now but nothing is ever perfect. Those of us who lived through the bad days are actually more technically proficient and able to handle bugs and errors than younger users because they've grown up using more reliable stuff with all the advanced settings turned off.

Posted at 8:06AM, Jun. 7, 2022

dpat57 wrote:
I used to rotate 3 drives plus numerous USB sticks, backing up every day as I made new stuff, it's easy to get distracted and neglect these things. And then some random component decides it's had enough.

This is basically it in a nut shell. I'm sure I'll be super steadfast about it for the next couple months…then I'll start to get lazy again and think "well…I can copy it over later…" Until this inevitably happens again. Whoops.

bugbyte wrote:
The worst scenario I had (which still occasionally reappears to haunt me) is this one period a few years ago where my main computer was dying a slow death, I was temporarily working off my husband's old laptop and had files there, and then I bought a new laptop to replace my dying machine. At the time I was kind of working at a breakneck pace so not everything got moved to the right place all at once, and it was a process of gathering up all the files and copying them into ONE place. I gave myself heart failure by misnaming a folder with all that work in it, so I thought that I had lost an entire chapter of pages, but I hadn't. Ugh.

Now I keep multiple, complete, well-labeled copies of absolutely everything.

This always ends up biting me too. The slow death kinda gets you used to it each step of the way, so you kind of keep expecting it to hold out just like it always has. At least with the sudden failures you HAVE to do something right away. Haha!

And yeah, my room is a mess, but my desktop is immaculate! Everything with a proper label and a specific home. I can imagine the panic attack of the mislabel, but man the relief at finding it again must've been great!

I may have to look into those services myself. I'm trying to avoid adding to my subscription services (I refuse to buy subscription Photoshop and just keep getting by with CS6, haha) but it really sounds like this may be worth it.

Ozoneocean wrote:Back in the day Photoshop had a thing where it would randomly crash while you were working on it. I had a shortcut button assigned as save function and would save after every few minutes constantly.
I'm STILL in the habit of "ctrl+S" all the time whatever I'm working on.

Oh heck yeah! That combined with having grown up playing Sierra adventure games ("save early, save often!") got me in the habit of hitting that particular shortcut basically any time I even pause my work to look up at something. Though I do like that Photoshop now has a recovery feature, I'm also happy that I haven't really needed it.

Ugh, can't believe you ended up having to deal with a virus. Pretty much all of mine came down to either hardware failure or just genuine blunders on my part. What a pain THAT must've been!

Posted at 12:06AM, Jun. 8, 2022

Just wait till the "solar flares" gets here