I've told you that I have been (secretly) writing my thesis. Well, I have and I haven't. I haven't written more than that 1 page of actual text, and writing in secret between experiments is slow-going. But I have been writing in the sense that I've written that 1 page (yeah!) of thesis text, and I have written several pages of protocols and methods that I've used to conduct my experiments. (The latter are shoved into a chapter in the back of the thesis, but they are integral to the body of work as a whole, and usually require a lot of time looking through notebooks, looking up solutions and recipes, finding catalog numbers of reagents ordered, etc.)
So my total time invested has been a fair number of (secret) hours. And all of it was nearly lost this weekend.
For the past month or so my computer has been making an interesting noise. It is best described as a whirring, thrumming, electrical-sounding, high-pitched drone. It isn't overly loud or bad sounding, but different. At first I thought it was my monitor, which was purchased in 1999. Then I suspected it was my master hard drive, which is sorta OK because I have been using that only to store my OS and programs. Any files I have go on my slave drive, which is only 3 years old. (My master drive is from 1999.) Worst case scenario: I get a new master drive, install an OS on it, and I've still got all of my files.
Well, the sound turned out to be my slave hard drive, where I store all of my files, including those pertaining to my thesis. On Saturday I couldn't access my slave drive all of a sudden. I got concerned. Really concerned. It had died.
After shutting down the computer, opening it up and messing around with the drive cables for a while, restarting it, shutting it down, letting it cool off for two hours and restarting it once again, I was able to access my slave drive. I quickly copied all of the files over to my master drive. By "quickly" I mean that it was a nail-biting 3 hours as the computer struggled to move files, with the slave drive making horrendous noises. Three hours to copy 1.5 gigabytes. (That is slow.)
I was able to copy every single file but one. "One file?", you say. "That's not so bad." Well, I haven't yet told you which file it was. It was a file so important... Ha ha, just kidding. It was unimportant and I already had a back-up copy. ;) But seriously, that was the only file I couldn't copy, luckily.
When it finally completed, I shut down the computer and went home. Yesterday morning I burnt a DVD of the files. I also copied the most important ones to our lab server.
With the entire universe conspiring against me graduating, the last thing I need is to lose my thesis due to computer failure. OK, I exaggerate: only my advisor and thesis committee are conspiring against me. It was a stressful day, let me tell you...
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4 comments:
Find more than one place to backup your files and do so often. You can even get a USB stick to use if necessary. Your data could be recovered from a bad hard drive using a service that specializes in data recovery but expect to pay from a few hundred dollars to a thousand. So if you really need it bad enough as in thesis it is possible.
Oh man!
Thankfully you were able to get everything.
Type things on an old-school typewriter. Then copy the sheets you have typed and then have someone scan them for you for future use.
Until mid-late high school, I used an electric typewriter. When people would say things like, "my computer crashed," I was really happy to have a typewriter. Of course it was slow and always ran out of eraser tape, but oh well. Then I had an electric word processor and thought that that was the most amazing thing ever.
Im glad to hear you are writing.
yeah, dad, i usually do, but in trying to be secretive i hadn't put any thesis documents on the lab server. i don't think i need to be that secretive, although...
a usb key is an awesome idea. i will buy one soon; a >1-gig key with a thumbscanner. ;)
hyunmi, my grandmother had a typewriter when i was really young. i liked typing, even if there was no ink or paper. i was amazed at how the keys moved to strike the tape, and would try to 'type' as fast as i could to see if i could jam the keys. it was tough to do; i basically had to mash a whole group of keys with my palm.
what's an electric word processor? are you jokingly referring to a computer? if so, that went right over my head...
No joke. It was a glorified typewrited. All it could do was word processing but you could save it to a floppy disk. Apparently no one else really used one. Mike was also confused by this and then said he thinks he knew of one person who had such a thing.
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