Writing, promotion, tips, and opinion. Pour a cuppa your favorite poison and join in.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Introductions, Queries, and Catastrophic Computer Failure


At Unicorn Bell, we strive to keep the info fresh and the crits plentiful. To that end, we have new names and faces to liven the discussion up a bit. Check out the sidebar and welcome the newest on UB's team.

*cue the confetti*

  • Beth Fred
  • Kristin Smith
  • Misha Gericke
  • Matthew Keith

Query and Loglines. This is your week to get a query or logline critique. Send it soon and I’ll post it.

Data Loss and Reluctant Computers. Imagine losing every financial record for the last twenty-five years. And even worse, every word you’ve written in the last five. Scary, huh.

When my computer crashed (rolled over, feet up in the air), I was happy for all the redundant backups I had. It was quite the heart-pounder for a while. Now that all my records are found and working, I still see little hiccups in the programming. Little annoyances like browsers fighting it out, firewalls sniffing when I tell them to shape up, and security systems pretending they don’t know me.

Advice: Backup, backup, backup. I discovered that I had an extra backup system that I’d forgotten about. It was working all the time in the background and I didn’t know it. *sigh*

Keep an external drive in addition to an online service for your backups. Don’t think your computer is safe from weird
stuff. I don’t know if it had anything to do with it, but when I opened the panel, I found a dead june bug in the innards.

A little disconcerting to be sure.



Looking for queries to crit. Send, Send.



10 comments:

Robin said...

So glad your computer information was not lost forever.

A dead June bug, eh? Gross.

blankenship.louise said...

Yes, backup, backup, backup. I've set my Scrivener to put all its backups in Dropbox!

Misha Gerrick said...

Mailed you. :-)

Huntress said...

@ Robin: yes, I actually had a computer 'bug'.

@LB: I need to look into Dropbox. Hearing more and more about it. And you can never have too many backups :)
@Misha: Got it!

Angela Brown said...

*scrambles away from the dead june bug picture and to make sure everything has been backed up*

WordsPoeticallyWorth said...

Thank you. Love love, Andrew. Bye.

Liz A. said...

Yikes. Good reminder to backup. I need to do this. Will do it when I get some time.

Matthew Keith Reviews said...

I'm all about Google Drive, now. It doesn't matter if all three of my computers die at the same time--my stuff's still there on Google all safe and cozy.

But I backup, too--the important stuff anyway.

Ask me how many times I had crashes BEFORE I started backing up, though...

Suzanne said...

Had that scare a few years ago with my computer crashing and I thought I had lost years of photographs, was psychotic LOL! Now I make sure I back up onto a separate hard drive regularly!
Suzanne @ Suzannes Tribe
xx

Unknown said...

Certainly. Backups should be a reflex action for writers at this point, since a lot of writers and publications have gone digital. It's a new paradigm for data, with its own set of problems and solutions. The most pertinent of which is making sure that our computers and hard drives are in good condition and working at all times.

RBSMN