Randomiser wrote:Runsforcelery wrote: Of course, one reason I've been able to devote as much time as I have to it over the weekend is that the hard drive on my desktop computer crashed at about 4 a.m. on Thursday morning. I'm supposed to have it back sometime tomorrow
Ouch! 4 or 5 days downtime from a disk crash.
Nobody likes a smartass, but can I diffidently suggest you might benefit from getting at least mirrored disks in a network attached storage box to keep your stuff on? I'm not up on US prices but would guess 2 or 3 hundred dollars would do it. That plus a copy of your voice recognition software for one of your other computers would keep you going almost seamlessly next time a disk crashes. (I'm going off to think about how to back up my own hard disk right now
)
I had all the relevant files on cloud storage, so I didn't lose the data or any of the projects on which I was working. The problem is that (as you noted) because of the damage to my wrist I use Dragon Naturally Speaking when I write, and I hadn't backed up the
voice files with all of the specialized vocabulary in over a month. That equates to all of the new names, dialect, specialized terms, etc., from a manuscript which was already over 165,000 words. My super bad.
That meant that I could work on my backup (although it's a lot slower than my desktop and
really doesn't like files of over 4,000-5,000 words using Dragon, especially with tech bible files simultaneously open for reference
), but without the current voice files, I couldn't work on the current
project which "freed up" time for other uses. (Well, I really
could have, but it would have been extremely slow and much less productive than on my desktop, given the need to re-enter all of the lost vocabulary info into the laptop profiles.)
My SOP is to back up the voice files after each session, but I was working 14 hour days trying to finish the book before Honorcon and it slipped my mind somehow. Besides, to be perfectly honest, my voice had reached the point where fatigue had so roughened it that the software was having an awful time understanding me anyway, not to mention programming it with cracked pronunciations which don't help future recognition problems. So, everything taken together, it just made sense for me to take a break and "play" with Dilandu.
Besides, I really enjoyed it!
In the meantime, I'm taking the opportunity for a major hardware update (since I didn't have a whole heck of a lot of choice
) and I'll be going to a pair of completely separate towers,
plus mirrored drives in each,
and a new, heavy-duty laptop with bunches more memory, RAM, and speed. "Take
that, you silly cyber k-night!"