Jul
14th
2015
I HATE MICROSOFT SO MUCH RIGHT NOW · 7:08am Jul 14th, 2015
I just lost an hour's worth of work on Discord's meeting with Gilda in Not The Hero because freaking Microsoft decided to do a Windows Update while I was in the middle of writing, without notifying me, so quickly that the damn thing didn't even have time to autosave!
God, I'm angry right now. Turns out there was a setting for "automatic" updates, which I never toggled to automatic and which I was never asked about. I have it set to the much more reasonable "notify to schedule updates" which ought to be the GODDAMN DEFAULT, now, but that doesn't save my lost hour of writing.
I might be able to rescue it... there's an .asd autosave file in my autosave directory. Time to go look up what I can do with that.
There is absolutely no reason why any piece of software should automatically update without user input.
Ever.
Not even if it's the master program that keeps the Earth spinning.
I cannot, for the life of me and everyone that I know, understand why a lot of developers don't seem to get this. I don't want your damn update! I don't care if there's new features, I'll patch it if and when I feel like it!
3236785
Aye. I worry Windows 10 is coming to get me and I'll press the wrong button one day and that will be it.
My laptop likes to shut down with no warning. Sometimes it's to update something; sometimes it's just for giggles. I hate it.
3236803
I'll just leave this here....
I tend to use google docs for all my prose now. If nothing else, not only does it autosave every word, it can revert to earlier versions if I'm so inclined.
You left it an hour without saving?
That's why I use Google Docs for pretty much everything. Even if the computer explodes while I'm writing, I don't loose any progress.
Go try it, it works really well for Chessiecat: I can leave comments for him while I proofread Starlight Over Detrot, and we can both see what the other is doing in real time.
Is that Windows 8.0? My condolences.
Not to sound insensitive, but you should probably save more often than once per hour - I've made it a subconscious habit to hit "CTRL+S", so much so I end up tapping my fingers to "save" paper-documents.
A useful habit though, saved me a lot of grief in the past.
I hope you can recover your work from that backup file. Claws/paws crossed!
Riddle me this:
I can get a power cut in my house, have my computer shut down completely, restart it ages later after waiting for my internet connection to recover, and upon relaunching Chrome I can not only immediately restore my last session, but the text of the unposted comment I typed up before the power went out is still written out in the box waiting for me to post it. How is it that I can get that back, but we can't retrieve lost information on a program with an actual autosave function?
What I like to do is save my work after every two paragraphs or so, just in case. You can also try investing in Google drive, where everything saves automatically. I really hope you get your work back though; I would be pretty pissed off too if all of my hard labor just dissapeared like that.
3:00 am -- never have anything important going on on a windows box at 3:00 am. And yes Microsoft does have a habit of toggling that setting on its own.
I know your pain. My computer just loved to update random bullshit while I was writing my reviews until I just started writing them in a story,
What's the difference between you and Jesus?
Jesus saves.
I'm not sorry at all.
3237045
That's why I switched to Google Drive as well, you'll never loose your shit. Especially if you enable Offline Saving as well. Plus, Microsoft Word won't even remember I activated it...
3236806
So glad this exists
img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140127094455/mlp/images/thumb/e/ec/Discord_with_eyelashes_S4E11.png/320px-Discord_with_eyelashes_S4E11.png
3237064
I know about 3 am, but I'm in a different time zone, and my laptop time is set by the domain server back home. So from my perspective it was 12 am and I forgot the laptop still thinks it's 3.
3236842
It has autosave on... but the autosave didn't come up automatically. I was able to find it, eventually, so i only lost 10 min in the long run.
3236814
Usually it asksme how I want to set that. I just reinstalled this machine due to hard drive failure, though, and it was a new build of the OS (I am on Windows 10, because screw 8.) So I guess they don't ask anymore.
3236872
I hate direct-compose-to-cloud, because LAG. I cannot tolerate the lag involved in composing to a drive on our gigabit ethernet network, never mind the internet; for me, composing on cloud is hellish. Besides I'm pretty sure I sold my soul to Microsoft when I started working as an MS consultant. :-)
Thank Goodness CelestAI never figured out automatic updates.
3237845
. (Seriously, "install in 12 hours" would have fixed most of my issues with windows 8 automatic updates...but at least those can be turned off.)
You guess correctly. If you're on a home version of Windows 10, the updates will install automatically. There is an option* to "notify to schedule restart" (which will prompt you to pick a time for it to be installed), which is at least nicer than Windows 8's default behavior of "We'll remind you in 24 hours, then you will have the option of us forcing the install in 24 hours, because surely if you're on your computer at 3 pm today and 3 pm tomorrow you won't be using it at 3 pm the day after that"
If you are on Pro or Enterprise, though, you will have the option to defer updates.
*Go to Settings, Update & Recovery, Windows Update, Advanced Options, select "notify to schedule restart". When an update requires restarting, it will pop up and ask you to pick a time for the restart to happen. I know you've already found it, but I'm betting that not everyone has.
3237845
Glad it wasn't the full hour. There's nothing more soul-crushing to me than dropping down a giant chunk of prose only to have technical problems destroy it. Rewriting from scratch something I've already written is even worse than trying to edit it.
Losing my work is my #1 cause of dropping software like a hot potato. Scrivener earned my loyalty when I discovered that it not only autosaves every time you pause typing for more than a second or two, but also makes automatic backups every time you close the document. I discovered this when a Dropbox glitch wiped out several hours of solid work, and Scrivener's backup meant I didn't lose a single letter.
3236943 Because your browser is snided with tracking cookies. How else are they supposed to watch everything you do in the effort of throwing targeted adds in your face?
3239436
Then Word should have cookies too. A browser shouldn't be better at saving my work than the program I do my work in.
I fucking know right, arrogant motherfuckers.
This is why you instinctively save every 10 seconds (at the cost of crippled productivity and crushed dreams).
You can't throw the blame completely onto Microsoft. You didn't check if auto updates were active, you left your computer for over an hour, and you didn't save beforehand.
3242037
I didn't leave my computer at all. I was actively working and had just finished typing a paragraph three seconds before Windows rebooted me. I have never seen that behavior before, and I've been working with Windows since 3.1. Generally you get a prompt that either says "Restart now or restart later", or you at the least get "Your computer will be rebooted to install updates. Save your work." But no, it acted as if I hadn't been working on it up until a few seconds before the reboot. The hour of work I thought I'd lost was the hour between the last save and the reboot. And with autosave, I've never seen the need to save constantly; usually the autosave catches it. (As, in fact, it did; the failure was that Word didn't recognize that there was an autosave file available, so I ended up finding it manually, after ranting.)
It's true that I didn't check to see if I'd turned off automatic updates -- but the automatic updates I've encountered in the past do not butt in while you're working and restart you with no warning whatsoever. That's actually usually the result of a computer crash of some kind, but the event log says no, it was a restart for updates.
So no, I am going to continue to blame Microsoft for the ten minutes of work it turned out I really lost, because something they've done has made it so that auto update restarts kick in without paying attention to the fact that you're still working, and giving you no warning. Fortunately I recovered most of my work by finding the autosave file, but I still lost ten minutes.
3242080 This is something I've never encountered before. Or heard about before. Are you sure this was an actually update?
3242093
Well huh. Now that I look into it, the Windows Update logs don't seem to think it was an update; I may have been misinterpreting what I read in the Application logs. It happened at precisely 3:00 am my computer time, though, and I did have Automatic updates on and I am on a technical preview of Windows 10, which is expected to have bugs. So that would have been a really weird coincidence if the computer crashed at exactly 3 am with no warning, no blue screen, no errors thrown ahead of time.
3242139 It was probably a bug, something to be expected with what amounts to a beta build.