Hiatus · 6:33am Mar 2nd, 2016
Gonna be a hiatus for a bit on my two stories (more so for Altered Visage). Details after the page break.
So my computer decided to up and crash on me, quite severely. Eventually I was able to get it working again by reinstalling Windows 7 off of the disk for it, but I lost everything I had, my computer was a clean slate. I've managed to get my backup working and am trying to restore it now, but that backup is from early December, nearly three months ago. Even if the restore works and it doesn't crash again, everything I had written in the last 2.5 months, whether they be edits, brainstorming, plans or entire chapters, is gone.
Until I get my computer issues more or less resolved and I build up the morale to rewrite the chapters I've lost, Altered Visage is going on hiatus, and to a lesser extent, so is Honeycrisp (lesser because I didn't lose anything for it that wasn't posted already and it doesn't have an update schedule to begin with). I promise I will get back to posting it again, this is not going to be a hiatus that stretches into forever, but don't be surprised if it takes a few weeks before I post another chapter.
I should be glad this happened when it did and not a few weeks earlier, at least now I've only lost a little over 2 chapters of Altered Visage. I've lost a few other minor things such as a few things I hadn't posted at all and the last few documents for the chapters of Honeycrisp, but seeing as those ones are all posted already I can replace them with a simple copy/paste. Kind of wish it had delayed one more day, though. I had planned on uploading the next chapter of Altered Visage to fimfiction the day my computer died, though it wouldn't have been made public until Thursday, as per the norm.
I'll let this be a lesson to me...I need to at bare minimum keep a flash drive of all my writings so that I don't lose it again, if not outright back everything up once a week.
Nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!
Awe damn. This is why a good backup strategy is becoming more and more crucial to consumers...
Sorry about the loss, here's to hoping things get better!
You should write on Google's Word doc because it saves your work online for backups just in case something happens to it.
I, quite literally, just got into your Altered Visage story two days ago.
The flash drive and Google Drive tactics are both viable. I go for flash drive myself.
Can you say what happened in a bit more details? I am asking, as such catastrophic crashes are rather rare and if they occur those are 99% serious hardware faults. Did you try to mount the damaged volume using a bootable pendrive/cd with some rescue Linux (it should be able to read your Win7 partition even if it's slightly damaged)? If you did not try that, maybe it's a good idea to install (and test
) such a system to see if it could help when a crash like this happens in the future.
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Something I've been told a few times in relation to other stuff I do. Perhaps I really should look into that.
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I hate to be that guy, but when it comes to computers I'm not that much above illiterate and as such wouldn't know how to begin doing what you're suggesting.
As far as more information....best I can do is to post the error message I received.
"Bad_System_Config_Info"
When I google searched it, I got a few videos and a few people asking questions about. I admit I didn't get everything that was said, but some suggested it may have been in relation to a flaw with Windows 10 itself...maybe.
I have been getting occasional warning messages that one of my hard drives if failing, though when I do the chkdsk scan of the one it mentions, it says there's nothing wrong with it.
Regardless, this PC is 5.5 years old and it's probably time to buy a new one anyway.
edit:
Actually, I could mention what happened right before the crash. When I started up my computer that day, it bypassed the usual event of bring me to the user select screen where you have to enter your password. It went straight to being logged in and had several programs open, ones that I had opened myself some point in the recent past including a word document of one of the (now lost) chapters of Altered Visage, though it wasn't what I had last left it (or saved it) as.
When I tried restarting the computer, I got that Bad_System_Config_Info error and it also was saying that my computer didn't start up properly.
I am sorry to tell you that but it seems that your files would be recoverable if you had proper software tools at your disposal...
I would try the tutorial on howtogeek
If I may offer a suggestion, I would strongly advise you to try it on some dummy file (i.e. create a file as if you were writing a story, paste some text onto it (say, 10 complete sentences so it's easy to see if something is changed/missing etc.) and then try to recover the file onto your pendrive.
It goes without saying that the above may be performed only after you've made (AND TESTED!) a backup of all the important files) - the best is to use cheap USB drive (store backups in a different room in case of a fire!) + online storage (don't rely on cloud alone!). Don't be discouraged though - it should be simple enough
.