Thursday, October 29, 2015

Perils of the Writer: Technical Difficulties

So, the other day I attempted to upgrade the operating system on my laptop.  One way or another, I messed up-- I think I interrupted the download or some other mistake.  End result, my laptop didn't have a functioning operating system.  It was pretty much screwed up.
Fortunately, I've got Time Machine and a LaCie backup, so restoring the computer is no problem.
Unfortunately, I hadn't done a backup on the LaCie in eight days.  So that means a week's worth of work that was gone once I restored the computer.
Fortunately, I have all my writing work in Google Drive, so everything gets backed up on the google cloud right away. So nothing was actually lost.
Unfortunately, Scrivener and Google Drive kind of confuse each other, in that Scrivener saves all of my stuff as individual rtfs, and then Google Drive is all, "Oh, you've got a different version of that rtf, so here's a conflict version." and Scrivener doesn't care about the conflict version, because it's already looking at the old one.
Thus I had to manually go through the conflicts and put them into my "real" Scrivener files to get everything up to date.
All in all, the set-back was fortunately only a few hours, and nothing was lost.  The worst of it was one scene of Thorn III, where I didn't notice the conflict file, so when I was working on it again a few days later I thought, "Didn't I write more of this scene?  Where is it?"  Fortunately, I found it and all was corrected.
I don't have too many technical problems.  Scrivener, for the most part, is a blessing, including more or less constantly saving the work as I go.  When I've had a sudden freeze-up or crash, I don't think I've ever lost more than half a sentence, and only if I was literally typing it as it crashed.  Plus, Scrivener actually works nicely on my computer.  I mean, maybe I have an old version of Microsoft Word or something, but in and my Apple operating system often act like a divorced couple meeting at a mutual friend's party.  
That's not something I need to deal with when I'm trying to write.
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I'll be at Austin ComicCon this Saturday, so come on down if you're in the area.  In the meantime, I've got to put finishing touches on to An Import of Intrigue, and plenty more to work on beyond that.  

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