#I had a backup of like. my laptop data

[hellenhighwater]

oh god my old laptop got KO'd unexpectedly and it's looking like I maybe don't have my firefox account synched up properly so I'm having to re-do all the firefox extensions I used to have and I don't remember all the extensions I used to have. Or all the block updates I had in UBlock to keep youtube from being an ad-ridden hellscape.

Help, fellow hellsite users--what are your firefox extensions of choice?

[cobaltsage]

I know my friends often think I’m paranoid for omitting pretty much every smart device outside of your standard phone and laptop from my life but honestly after playing Megaman Battle Network as a child, I know it’s only going to take a few very inspired people tired of corporate BS and experiencing a mental break to create a real world variation of World III.

Like. We’ve already heard of stories of people whose chastity cages got electronically hacked and force locked, and while that’s certainly creative, MMBN absolutely had way more simpler, and entirely possible crimes to commit.

Our fridges are online? Who controls that temperature. Maybe entire grocery stores will find their food either freezer burnt or spoiling.

Our thermostats? Well, it’d be a shame if somebody globally altered the temperature floor of the device to be boiling point.

Our cars are smart now? The literal first game had a chapter that merely took over traffic lights, it would only be easier to make the cars simply lock their users in and drive into each other.

Most data centers I’ve been to, even in multimillion dollar orgs, have dozens and dozens of servers protecting websites and the backup management processes are all handled by a single laptop that has a sticky note that says “do not close laptop” in a room that is virtually untouched for weeks at a time, except to check the temperatures of the cooling systems in the same room. As security, I can say I would have no idea if someone who came in for server maintenance was doing something suspicious or not, and even third party maintenance staff are often left to their own devices to work on perceived problems. Sure, they’re on camera, but so what if the next three people who work in the room are all going to be more third party maintenance staff?

Knowing that full well, I’m never going to buy a smart bidet for fear that it will end up with its water pressure settings altered, turning it into a power washer that ass blasts me to death.

[thezombieprostitute]

Hope you work day is going alright!💞

A drop-in visit from PhD!Candidate Curtis on his way back to his apartment from the university. He’s gotta run some data analysis for his thesis, but has no idea where to start. Someone said you could help him find a way?

Sincerest thanks for your patience, Essie! My muse did not want to work on this for the longest time!

A/N: Reader is gender neutral. No physical descriptors used.

Warnings: college/university stress. You don't know pain until you see university students begging the printer to work faster during finals week.

Today seemed to be regular day at the reference desk. You were answering emails from the mathematics faculty and students, assuring them about library holdings of their requested materials. Sometimes directing them to the LaTeX to TeX converter you'd had to make, silently cursing MathSciNet and zbMath for not converting yet. Thankfully, the library students you were monitoring at the reference desk were able to handle most of the questions that got directed at them.

At least until a tall, very handsome man with a buzzcut, wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket walks in. You keep an eye on him as he approaches the desk because he doesn't look happy and you're not about to let anyone yell at the students. Thankfully he seems polite enough, neither of the students look scared, but they do direct him to you.

Making eye contact, you motion him over and he's quick to obey.

"How can I help?"

"I'm, I'm Curtis and...my, my data is...I think it got corrupted," he removes his sunglasses and he looks completely devastated. "I can't lose this data. It's, it's my thesis."

You nod in what you hope is a reassuring manner, "do you have a copy of the data in the university servers?"

He holds out a flash drive and you grab the laptop that's never allowed to connect to the network and get it ready. When it is you hold your hand out and he gives you the drive. Plugging it in you take a few minutes to figure out what you're looking at. Some of the terminology is familiar, he's clearly not a mathematics PhD, based on the labels you're able to discern.

"Oh, I see the problem," you tell Curtis, who's looks keep distracting you from your work. "You were, understandably, trying to use data you'd picked up using our Statistica license on your home computer that has the public domain Dataplot software."

"And I'm guessing the two are not interchangeable," Curtis sighs in defeat.

"Unfortunately the metadata schemas they use for the data sets don't work well together," you nod. "The data isn't corrupted, it's just very, very messy and it would take you a lot of late nights to clean it all up again, even if you knew R."

He scratches the back of his neck, "so my data is useless?"

"You have backups, right? You didn't just keep all your data on this flash drive, right?"

"I have backups," he nods. "But it's still months of work down the drain." He raises his hands to his face, looking like he wants to cry. It's a look you're painfully familiar with given your line of work.

You unplug the drive and hand it to him, "hey, look at me." He lowers his hands a little and the pain in his beautiful blue eyes breaks your heart. "You're going to be okay. Yes, it's a lot of time you'll never get back, but it's not the end. You're going to be able to kick this data's ass and get it in line because you know what you're doing with it now. Your thesis hit a setback, it happens a lot more than people would like to admit. You're not alone and you will be able to get this done."

He seems to take your words to heart, taking a few breaths and standing up straight.

"And make sure to get yourself a treat," you add. "You're hurting and you need to take care of yourself."

He almost smiles as he nods and walks out.

🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣🔣

It's been a few months and you'd almost forgotten about the poor PhD student. You probably would have had his physique not stood out so much. The same physique you see walking towards the reference desk, but with a giant smile. You smile in return, he must've gotten his data sorted out.

He walks up to you, "I don't know if you remember me--"

"Statistical software mess, right?"

He lowers his head as his cheeks develop a pink tint, "yeah."

"I'm guessing it all worked out?"

"I'm officially Dr. Everett, now."

Your smile grows, "congratulations, Doctor!"

"Thanks, um," he rubs the back of his neck. "If, if it's not too forward, could I take you out to dinner? As a thank you?" Your eyes go wide. "It wasn't just the data, software stuff that you helped me with. I was genuinely considering just dropping out, giving up. But then you looked me in the eyes and told me I could do it and...and I want to thank you for that."

Smiling, you tell him, "I get off at 6."

Tagging: @alicedopey; @delicatebarness; @icefrozendeadlyqueen; @ronearoundblindly

[silvermoon424]

what's the most important piece of advice you could give someone who's getting into downloading media (piracy, archiving, whatever)?

For the love of God, MAKE BACKUPS. I had to learn this lesson the hard way as a teenager when my external hard drive crashed and I couldn't pay the data recovery fee (which would have been a few hundred dollars, if it even worked).

Have backups. Have backups of your backups. To give you an idea of what my data and backup setup is:

My laptop: two backups (physical backup via external hard drive and automatic cloud backup via BackBlaze)

My media collection: three sources/backups (two external hard drives and a NAS [network attached storage system] with a failsafe measure because it has two hard drives; I will most likely look into cloud-based backup as well).

If you've noticed, I not only have a backup of all my data, I also have backups of backups. When it comes to your precious data, you seriously can't be too careful. I would recommend at least investing in one physical backup option as well as a cloud-based one (like BackBlaze).

[patchdotexe]

HOO BOY I AM HAVING. A DAY.

so . last night after finishing the animation, literally like 2 hours later, my laptop shut off and would not reboot. would not even show the "i am plugged in" indicator light. switched outlets, nothing. figured maybe it overheated bc it used to do that, so i let it cool off, aaaand nothing. went to bed. woke up this morning, still dead.

turns out the motherboard is fried. it's way too expensive to replace, so... metallix is dead. thankfully the local pc repair guy is able to back everything up to my external drive, and in fact has done this before Last time i had a laptop with a suddenly-dead motherboard, but there's a high chance that i've lost some stuff... including all of my minecraft save data. all of my screenshots from the various servers ive been on, potentially all of the world downloads i had (i may have moved those to my external to free up space, i dont remember), but most importantly: the savefile i was using to record my series that i was planning to get back to once things were a bit less stressful irl and i had less projects.

(i also may have lost all of my davinci resolve projects. i dont know where that data is stored. that also stings, but if i have the artwork still-- which i should-- then i can redo them bc the wips were all in early sketch animatic stage.)

the good news: i am currently borrowing my mom's pc to be able to make this post, bc otherwise i've been on mobile all day and it is kind of killing me. better news: i have a backup laptop exactly for the purpose of "something has happened to my main one". less better news: that backup laptop got water damage a while ago and im only now getting it repaired. thankfully it can be repaired, and while its pricey its at least something i can cover.

im stressed out. today has been a bit of a mess between running back and forth between home and the pc guy, being super frazzled over money and what is and isnt worth trying to save, the terror of maybe not being able to save things, and praying that all of my art is recoverable (it should be).

so, uh, that's where i've been today.

[cauchesque]

Hi, can you tell me about btrfs? It was a default choice for the filesystem when I installed fedora on my laptop and I read little bit about how it is different from like ext4 and what cool stuff it supports etc. But I newer, like, utilised all that stuff in it. So, if you don't mind, can you tell me what am I missing and how do I utilise it potential?

btrfs! what is btrfs? btrfs is a copy-on-write journaling filesystem with various other goodies. my experience is mostly using it on one disk on my personal machine, which seems to be what you're doing with it also. you may have heard some bad things about btrfs eating your data silently and then the mailing list being really mean about it, and all that is true but it's only true if you're using btrfs raid4 or raid5, which you aren't. for our use case there's absolutely nothing to fear- btrfs is an absolutely rock solid filesystem and i wouldn't accept any other for my daily driver

i was planning on writing this whole long thing summarizing my notes because when i was learning all this stuff i couldn't find any source that had everything i needed in one place. but that was 4 years ago, and since then fedora switched to using it by default. nowadays there are a bunch of articles explaining all the fundamental concepts and commands and such. the two linked at the bottom ive read and can vouch for, and they cover basically all the intuition for the concepts and commands and such. so im going to focus on cool things you can do with a COW filesystem

basically all the cool things you can do are snapshots. snapshots, better explained in the links, are lightweight copies of entire file trees. you can, for instance, take a snapshot of your home directory and then be able to access all your files at the time of the snapshot whenever you want, even if you change them in the "real" version. but you can do better than this. if your subvolume layout is correct (and don't worry, fedora's is), you can rollback to a previous snapshot whenever you want. with a little configuration you can make all your root snapshots bootable, so you can select in grub or whatever which version of your filesystem you want to boot into. with a little bit of doing, which im not sure is easy on fedora but certainly might be, i got my computer set up so that my boot directory is just a btrfs subvolume on my regular filesystem. if an update breaks my setup, which does happen from time to time, i can go back to exactly the state i was in, files packages kernel and all

you can and should use btrfs for your backups also. not local snapshots, those aren't very good backups, but incremental backups to an external drive or over ssh to another machine. for this i use btrbk, which is a pretty simple script that just makes use of btrfs features to make safe, fast, and reliable backups to wherever you might want them. then, because it's using native features of the filesystem, recovering from just about anything is dead simple. you can send over the subvolumes and mount them wherever. the one thing is that for most of these you need a bootable drive with btrfs and enough drivers to work on your system. whatever you used to install fedora should work fine

and with that you basically need fear no file loss event, big or small. i mean i wouldn't give up git or anything, but now you can retrieve your desktop layout, your browser settings, your /etc, whatever you want. its absolutely magic. since doing an install with this btrfs setup 4 years ago i have had absolutely nothing break in a way i couldn't fix in under 15 minutes, even running arch objectively badly. imagining life without snapshots feels barbaric now. its one of a handful of things which are just objectively better on linux for any user at any skill level. data loss is a choice, and it has been for almost a decade. take my hand

additional notes:

APFS: yeah apple has this too. time machine is a brilliant piece of software and the apple ppl are lucky to have it. however! i have needed to actually go back and use my backup like 2 times ever. most of the time i just use the snapshots locally. plus afaik you don't have the same range of options to deal with snapshot size- i dont hang onto my steam directory for very long

ZFS: if you need raid id say zfs is definitely better (zpool is awesome). but a lot of the things you can do with snapshots and subvolumes on btrfs aren't actually possible on zfs. a rollback on zfs is a very specific action which invalidates everything that came after- it's not to be done lightly. with btrfs you just move subvolumes around and they're available whenever you need them

encryption: its annoying but you should put your filesystem inside of lvm inside of LUKS and it'll work fine. its the same as using LUKS normally, and once it's open it's the same as using btrfs normally. this would probably suck for multiple disks, in which case you should use zfs

hibernation: use LVM to have a swap partition and call it a day, storage is cheap these days. ive heard swap files are improved somehow (?) but i dont use one and there really isn't any reason to

compression: imo not a showstopper or anything but it comes in handy. i wouldn't expect huge gains in space usage (storage is cheap anyway) but a lot of modern cpus are good enough at compression that it's actually faster to store everything compressed bc the bottleneck is disk IO. you can test what algorithm and level works best for you, and tune it by subvolume. on my nvme i dont notice a difference, but my server has some hard drives and compression speeds things up

[melancholy-marionette]

The Shuddering Releasing Later Tonight (hopefully x3) - then I will go cry myself to sleep T_T

Sooo, I'm gonna do my best to still release my O2A2 project later tonight like I'd hoped to, buuuut, my PC is now defunct AGAIN >.< Firstly, *puts on happy face* meet Styx! Voiced by the incredible - Vivian Reed :D

Styx may have a feminine appearance with an androgynous (but feminine-leaning) voice, but, being non-human, doesn't actually have a gender!

Styx is the only entity you'll encounter in The Shuddering, and is almost a little too pleased to see you!

*reverts back to sad face*

Sooo, yeah, I currently don't have a working PC again T_T Thankfully, I was able to export builds of The Shuddering prior to it becoming unusable, but if there are any bugs, I won't have a way of fixing them :(

I'm now attempting to finish off the itch page & draft posts on the old potato laptop once again!

This is the 2nd new PC that's been sent to me after the 1st one was faulty and had to be returned, and as of yesterday morning, it is stuck in an endless cycle of BSODs with all different error codes. During troubleshooting, the memory diagnostics tool also flags critical errors with the RAM. The 2nd PC has been kinda dodgy since day 1 with it randomly failing to boot some days + audio crashing randomly and then refusing to play any media files with sound. It also hangs randomly when just browsing Windows Explorer.

I did contact customer support to try and get help with the issues, but they just told me to do a CMOS reset, which sounded terrifying >.< I don't wanna touch any of the components inside the PC cos I worry I would break them!

Since I was in the middle of otome/josei jam, I just left things as they were and did my best to put up with the weird crap going on with the PC, making backups each night out of paranoia. My hope was that I would make it through the jam okay and that maybe the issues would improve somehow. But nope, they just got worse >.< Now I'm stuck with a PC I can't even use. Sometimes it refuses to boot entirely, others, it boots, but then only stays on for 5-20 minutes before it dies again. I spent most of the day (and night) troubleshooting, but nothing helps.

Customer support says it's probably gonna be a case of sending it back again for repair... but I would really just prefer to have a refund at this point :( They've sent out 2 now that don't work properly. Why would I have any faith left that a 3rd would be better?

I just want my money back so I can buy a PC from somewhere else that might actually send one that works. Actually getting the company to refund me is going to be a battle though I imagine. One that I'm really too tired to fight :( I don't have a choice though because the stupid thing took me years to save up for, so I don't have the luxury of just letting it go.

I swear I should have just demanded a refund right away when the first one they sent me sounded like a goblin revving up a chainsaw was living inside the case as soon as you powered it on >.<"

Anyways, sorry, just needed to vent because I'm stressed and devastated at the moment by it all. It took so long to transfer all my files and stuff over, and I've lost a small amount of project data for both LOVESTARVED & The Shuddering :( My paranoia backups mean most stuff is safe for now, but it's still frustrating to lose anything.

Here's to hoping the poor potato can at least hold out to launch The Shuddering later! x3 But first, I need a big break because I feel sick at this point, haha.

[netscapenavigator-official]

How do u like jellyfin? I've been using kodi since i've been looking for something more featured than VLC for browsing media but it feels bloated and makes wayyy to many internet connections automatically for me to really enjoy it or feel safe running it on any device that seeds torrents. I'm strongly considering jellyfin since I despise plex and ember is proprietary.

It’s the only media server software I’ve ever used, so I don’t have any points of comparison. Also, a transparency preface, the device my server is hosted on is an M1 Apple iMac that's running up-to-date macOS (as of the time of writing, that’s macOS Sonoma 14.1), so as always, your mileage could always vary on other operating systems and chipset architectures.

I also view content exclusively via the iOS app, Apple TV app, and Firefox for Linux x86-64, all of which I’ve never had a problem with.

For the most part, however, I haven’t had any complaints. I keep all of my content on a 2TB USB External HDD that I bought from Walmart. It stays plugged into the computer 24/7, and all I had to do was tell Jellyfin where the files were, which you have to do regardless of where they are.

I’m not an advanced user by any means. I’d love to get outside network support going, but even that is proving too intimidating for me. I probably don’t take advantage of most of the advanced features, either. From my experience with Jellyfin, though, it does what I wanted it to: allow me to view my videos and photos without having to download them onto my phone. I have three users set up (including the one mandatory admin profile), and that’s probably the most non-out-of-the-box thing I’ve done.

The only issue I’ve had is that if your host device loses power (or somehow force shutsdown or crashes without first properly quitting the Jellyfin app) during a library sync (which can take a long time if you’ve added a lot of data at once and are running it off an external HDD), the on-device database file seems to corrupt easily. When this database file gets corrupted, it makes the Jellyfin app panic and shutdown without actually closing the app. As a result, the app looks like it’s running properly, but when you try to access it from anywhere, it’ll fail to load. You have to check the .txt file logs to actually see the panic code and shutdown command. I’ve had that happen twice, and it isn’t very pleasant. Luckily, I also use macOS’s Time Machine feature, so I had plenty of backups. However, it is annoying to have to sort that out, and if you didn’t have backups, you’d basically have to restart the server from scratch. Your content would be fine, but all of your manual IMDb data, custom thumbnails, reported file locations, etc. would be factory reset.

Of course, if you’re running the server on something with a backup power supply or a built-in battery, that eliminates a lot of the risk. The iMac I run my server on also acts as a secondary computer, for me. So I'm also at a heightened risk of crashing and whatnot. If you had a dedicated server computer that did nothing but act as your Jellyfin server, that'd also probably help alleviate some risk.

The extent of my daily use of Jellyfin is constantly playing ambient music from an old iPad next to my stereo, and occasionally viewing images and videos from my phone or laptop. I’m certainly not a power user, but for me, I’ve never had any reason to dislike Jellyfin, so I don’t exactly have a desire to go looking for an alternative. It does what I need it to do, and it does it smoothly, simply, and reliably.

If you're looking for a more advanced user's opinion, however, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong blog.

[saturniandragon]

🏳️‍🌈 Are you a member of the LGBTQIA+ community?

💎 What’s your most prized possession?

🌴 Desert island item?

🏳️‍🌈 Are you a member of the LGBTQIA+ community?

Ma'am, I'm bisexual. You may say super bisexual. I was confused bisexual at first (2019-2021) but now I'm super bisexual.

And with super bisexual also comes superhorny/hypersexuality, because now I have more options when it comes to porn--

There's a funny story behind that, actually. A male Khajiit follower in Skyrim made me question my sexuality. He wasn't even that appealing visually but his dialogues just changed me in a way that I never felt.

Any Skyrim fans/players reading this, yes, it was Kharjo.

💎 What’s your most prized possession?

Well if you're talking like real world value, it's my gaming laptop! 2021 Axioo Pongo 7, the laptop I'm writing this answer with. Intel i7-11700 desktop CPU (yes, you read that correctly, this laptop uses desktop socket. Axioo even gives you a thermal paste if you want to swap the CPU with something else) with 8 cores and 16 threads, 16 GB of DDR4-3200 from factory, and a 115-watt RTX 3070.

1080p144hz screen, but I turned it down to 72hz because I'm old and not a competitive gamer. And also prolong the screen's lifespan a bit. My eyes can barely register the difference between 72 and 144. But still, I appreciate my RTX 3070 being able to push a lot of pre-2019 games up to 120+ fps.

You know there was a time I had to set a game resolution to 960x540 just to get 30 fps. That's even lower than standard Youtube 720p. So now, being able to experience my dream games at high or even ultra quality is... life changing.

All of that for less than 15 million IDR (USD 1000).

If you're talking sentimental value, it's... well, everything I've created. Adrastea Phelion Drago, my "saturniandragon" username, the planets and black holes I've rendered, Merri'sa, Zanri al-Anaqi, my writings, my videos, everything from my creative endeavors.

Which is why I was SO emotional when I initially thought I lost the NTFS image of my HDD and again when I successfully recovered my creative works.

I will say it again, however. If this doesn't convince you to backup your important data, I don't know what will.

🌴 Desert island item?

Knife. Not for survival. Just give me a knife and I'll just kill myself /j

I don't know what I'll bring if I was to be deserted on an island, tbh with you. Logically/realistically I guess a Swiss army knife.

If it has to be something I already own, well, I guess my phone. If I can't contact anyone at least I can jack myself off to death--

[biganimal92]

update for the 4 of you reading this that care (this isn't meant to be pessimistic I just mean that very few of my friends follow me on here lol)

I feel like my art has been stagnating for a long time and it's mostly because I limit myself to fandoms and the attention I get for my fanart messes with the way I value my self-worth so a few months back I decided I wanted to start doing a lot more with my art to gain more personal fulfillment and to give myself a direction i actually wanted to take it in so that i felt like i was making progress and going somewhere with it. I was making plans to create a proper portfolio of things that weren't star wars yaoi or the dudes from fall out boy fucking, and I was planning on launching a YouTube channel where I posted speedpaints and stuff and I actually made some decent progress

I drew something I was really proud of and I knew the content in it would be pretty popular despite still technically being fanart, and I had a time-lapse recorded for it and everything, I was even halfway through the script. I also had a number of original drawings I'd done that I never posted anywhere and I felt like by this time I should have been able to properly launch this stuff and start taking appropriate steps to have my art reach a wider audience.

butttttt then my laptop died suddenly and randomly (i was literally using it just fine, i lifted it up from my lap and it shut off and wouldnt turn back on) and it's been in the repair shop for a week and they still don't know what's wrong with it. they think it's a motherboard issue and if it ends up being at least $600 to repair it I'm just getting a new laptop. I think they can transfer the data on the hard drive to an external that I have and if so that'd be wonderful because that laptop contains all the work I've been doing these last few months for this thing I wanna do with my art.

thankfully since then my roommate is letting me have one of his backup gaming pcs (he works in tech so he has plenty) and I've been able to get set up there in case I need to start my progress over, but the issue is that it's a Linux and clip studio literally doesn't work with Linux because the desktop version of the program apparently relies on either edge being installed if it's windows, or safari being installed if it's Mac. so I can't sign in or download the full version, I'm stuck with the super limited trial version, and because of this I've been trying to get comfortable with Krita. which thankfully can record time-lapses.

my mental health has only been improving since moving to Seattle despite some pretty low lows so thankfully, even though this is uh a pretty big deal all things considered, I'm handling it really well. I had one horrible encounter with a psychiatrist when trying to get treatment for my anxiety and adhd, but since my insurance here sucks since I'm poor and nothing has worked for my other issues I've been fortunate to be able to see doctors about, I've officially become a crystal mommy and I've resorted to ~alternative medicines~ and as a result I've had a considerable amount of improvement in a very short amount of time with the things I've struggled with getting help with from a professional psychiatrist. so yeah, I'm only getting better

biggest issue that still impacts me is that my attempts at befriending people irl have not borne much fruit, granted I haven't been trying super hard but with a huge covid spike coming up soon, said weak attempts are going to have to be put on hold for the time being. especially since the main thing I was literally going to do as soon as Christmas was over was join this drawing group that meets up every other Sunday, but now I don't have my laptop so it'll just have to wait regardless of what the state of things are looking like otherwise

uhhh what else. oh yeah I got into Chinese yaoi and Indian cinema and I got out of my head enough to start playing genshin impact again so basically I'm a huge faggot ama

OH SHIT I forgot to mention I got another horrible job and I'm kind of trapped into keeping it for at least a year unless something catastrophic happens because it's giving me really important experience in the field I'm trying to go into, but when I say it sucks I mean it's probably the most disorganized place I've ever worked at that wasn't a locally owned franchise. I work at an open-access low income healthcare organization that's all over Seattle so when I say it's terrible and disorganized I think you get the picture

anyway I don't know how often I'll be on here but I'm bored and lonely and scrolling through tumblr seems like a better use of my time than spending an entire shift looking at r/shittyfoodporn

[naradreamscape]

Any tips on media storage? I gotta backup files on my aging laptop better but idk what to shop for when it comes to external hard drives.

I need to get a second hard drive myself, actually...I currently have a 1TB WD My Passport for device and computer backups, and some larger downloads. (I actually bought it about a decade ago so I could download a complete Mystery Science Theatre 3000 torrent onto it.) The average person might need around 500GB for their average computer and device use, but if you're preserving a lot of media, like doing VHS captures, you'll want to start at at least 1 terabyte.

External hard drives aren't forever, per se (heavy use can sometimes wear down the internal drive) but they're way more reliable as long-term storage format than USB drives. Keep them away from magnets or anywhere they can be dropped or bumped against, though...I remember one of the teams in my high school film class losing three short films they were working on, because they had their hard drive connected between two computers - thus placing the drive on the floor - and someone walked in without looking, and accidentally punted it across the room.

USB drives are fine for smaller storage (i.e. documents and photos, but their portability and open design leaves them open to collecting dust or moisture. They should be kept in a cool, dry place, and if you're transporting a USB often, try to look for one with a cap, or keep it in some sort of clean container.

For videos or .ISOs, you can also burn them to a disc, and store them either in a CD binder or plastic cases. Again, discs are fairly reliable long-term storage, but you'll want to keep them away from dust or scratching. Paper sleeves are fine for short-term storage, but they're prone to rubbing against the glossy side of the disc. I keep my burnt discs in a zipper binder with polypropylene pages, and replica DVDs I've burnt in plastic cases. (It's also fun to make case sleeves for them when they go into my library.) If you really like a movie, try to go for an official physical release of it; pressed discs (i.e. made in a factory rather than burnt at home) can last for decades with careful storage and use!

Finally, you'll want to keep precious files in two places - i.e. putting phone photo backups on your computer and on a CD/drive, or keeping a file on your computer and uploaded to Archive.org/Dropbox. But never rely solely on online file hosting. The deletions of MegaUpload and Geocities taught most of my generation that vast sources of data can, and will, vanish into the ether when we least expect it. Having two sources for precious media means that if one fails, you can always replace it from the other. For example, when I capture a DVD/VHS and really care about its contents, I will also keep the physical copy in my video library in case I need to reduplicate it someday.

I hope some of this can help! Digital archiving and storage is a fairly recent practice, but this is some of what has worked for me.

[runicmagitek]

Hi there Runic!

I was wondering your opinion on using Scrivner to draft fics vs using Word? Like pros and cons? (Some of the articles online are so confusing! >//<‘)

Thanks so much for the ask, anon! And also thanks for your patience; I wanted to give this some thought, hence the wait.

I primarily use Scrivener and have been using it for a little over a decade. I also use Word during the final phase of edits. I'll list some of my favorite features of each one, followed by the cons.

Scrivener

Organizing a story in Scrivener is where it shines the most. For a longer story, you can break things down by chapter and easily move them around as needed. For me, I use a single file for all my fics and breakdown folders by fandom, then by ships. The use of status markers and labels and custom meta-data, while initially daunting, are also super great to flag what state your draft is in along with any other indicators you wish to use. For me, I like marking if fics are for an exchange or a gift for a friend. I've even customized the meta-data so I can plug in potential tags and ratings as I go!

Snapshots is a neat function that makes a copy of your current file. I use it with each new phase of editing, in case I need to refer to an older version. It's super easy to switch back and forth between snapshots, plus there's a preview to show what has been removed or added from the last version!

There are a ton of compiling options for when you wish to export your story as a Word doc or a PDF or even for epublishing. I don't use this too often, but I have lots of friends who do and it makes proper formatting really simple.

There is a focus mode that removes all the UI stuff and just shows you the words. If this didn't exist, I wouldn't be able to write anything lolsob.

You can set target goals for each document or even the entire file. And if you have multiple documents in a single folder with word count targets applied, Scrivener will add them all up and give you a total target estimate. Really handy for planning out how long your story will be!

THERE IS A DARK MODE THEME.

Word

The grammar/spelling checker is a lot more robust in comparison to Scrivener.

Sharing your Word document and sharing notes/comments with beta readers is a LOT easier in Word. It's similar to how Google Docs works with leaving comments, replying to each other, and marking them as resolved.

Copy-pasting from Word into AO3's rich text preserves the formatting, whereas I've had a lot of wonky issues going from Scrivener to AO3.

Text-to-speech, while kinda weird, is a godsend when I want to read out loud a fic before posting, but don't have the energy to do so.

If you have Word, you likely have a Microsoft subscription, which means you have access to OneDrive, which makes for VERY easy backups. Plus you can get Word on your phone and work off that and your computer seamlessly at no extra cost.

THERE IS ALSO A DARK MODE.

Hokay, now for cons.

Scrivener

Scrivener is not free. It is a one-time fee of $60~. That said, if you participate in NaNo and win, you can get a discount code (I believe it's 50% off?)

It was originally made for Macs, but then a Windows version was developed. The team behind Scrivener is very small and it took… forever to get the Windows version up to speed with the Mac version. There are still some differences between the two, but thankfully both versions are on the same page. Jumping off of this, there is an iOS version, but no Android version.

If you wish to back up your Scrivener stuff, you can only really do that via a Dropbox account. Also, I believe it's not possible to open the same file on different computer types. So if you have two computers (one Mac and one Windows) and want to open the same file on both, it's not really going to work. In my experience, I've also run into issues getting things to sync and open when using two Windows computers. So if you're planning to bounce around different computers/laptops/etc., definitely keep this in mind.

On top of that, for every device you want Scrivener on? You need to pay for that.

Scrivener has got one hell of a learning curve, too. I've been using it for so long and am STILL discovering new ways to use it. It can be intimidating, even after you go through all the tutorials.

Word

This also costs money, but sadly is not a one-time fee AND you need to invest in a bundle plan instead of just getting Word. Home subscriptions range from $70 to $100 a year, depending if you're getting it just for yourself or for your family/friends to use too. For me, I use it with my boyfriend and we use all the programs a bunch, so it works out well for us. This might work for you too if you're interested in having access to things like Excel and OneNote and cloud storage. But if you just want Word, that's not really feasible.

I haven't experienced this because I've stopped writing novel-length stories in Word, but I've heard from friends that the program slows down after 30k words or so, which is unfortunate and frustrating.

Furthermore, you can't really transition from file to file in Word as you can in Scrivener. You'd need to manage the folders on your computer outside of the program.

Word isn't really designed for book formatting. You CAN do it, but it takes some extra work on your end to format things accordingly, whereas Scrivener has a bunch of built-in features to help with that.

Microsoft is A LOT bigger than the Scrivener team, thus there are frequent updates. And because of that, you need to perform more updates to the program and might even need to reacquaint yourself with features and UI changes.

I hope this helps! Regardless of which program you wish to use, I hope it goes smoothly and you have a blast writing your stories on it!

[ghostoftheyear]

I just read a comment on a post that made me very concerned, so I wanted to put out a PSA.

Someone was panicking during the recent AO3 outage, where the DDoS was trying very hard to put the site under for good, because they didn't have any way to recover their fics. Which is terrifying, sure... if all you ever do is write directly into the draft page on AO3.

But. Why would you do that?

Like. OK. I know I'm old, and I'm also privileged to have a desktop PC that I use for the majority of everything online. I understand this is not as common a circumstance as it used to be. But if you're using a laptop or PC, you should REALLY be writing somewhere else first. Even if it's just the native notepad program. Anything that allows you to save the file. You don't need something expensive like Scrivener. I personally use a text-based program called NoteTab, which is inexpensive, reliable, and has lots of nice little extras. Of course there's Word and OpenLibre and things like that. Even Google Docs if you're in a pinch (though I can't recommend it given that they're now starting their own AI-theft program).

I'm not as well versed in apps for phones and tablets. But even so, I beg you to find something to write on that isn't directly into AO3. The notes program? Email yourself? A physical notebook?

And there is a reason for this. Purely aside from the fact that the draft will only save your text for 30 days -- and was NEVER meant to be used as a word processor to begin with! -- you should always have a backup of your work somewhere, in the exact case of circumstances like this.

Many moons ago, I used a free site called Crosswinds to host my website. (There were a lot of these, like geocities, tripod, & so on.) One day, there was a server glitch and lots of my files were wiped from creation. I didn't keep copies of them anywhere else, and so they were just gone. I was able to recover some of it, but most of it was just. Gone. Forever.

These days, I edit my stuff on my PC first, and then upload it. I should also probably have another backup of some kind, because I have had catastrophic hard drive failures and lost everything. You think it won't happen to you. Then it does, and your stuff that you've labored on is just gone.

Plus, it's just good to be able to have the text in a location where you can easily read and edit; on top of that, you know that trick of putting it in another font so you can catch mistakes? That is exactly what happens when I get the fic into the preview page on AO3 and I'm able to see all those goddamn typos and missed italics tags and so on.

For the love of whatever you love, friends, you must keep your own backups. You will lose your data at some point. It's going to happen. Or a site will go down. Or something crashes. And it'll all be gone. You really can make sure that doesn't happen, and it'll take less time than you think.

But I will be over here begging on my arthritic, ruined knees for the rest of time: NEVER WRITE DIRECTLY INTO THE AO3 PAGE. EVER. DON'T FUCKIN DO IT.

[a-student-out-of-time]

How on Earth did your hard drive fail like that, your Laptop isn't that old...right?

//Well, I figure the problem, as multiple system recovery attempts failed to accomplish and frequent driver error messages suggest, is simply due to bad sectors in my old hard drive

//All the software problems were attempted and unsolved, and so the only real issue could've been due to these bad sectors

//Also, I've had this laptop for about three years now, and my brother used it for quite a while because I was still using my old one, which was literally falling apart, but it was a gift from my ex and I didn't want to part with it yet.

//And starting around the spring, I kept getting "Scan and fix driver errors," which I didn't think much of at the time, but it kept happening more and more frequently, and if software wasn't the issue, bad sectors likely were

//So really, it was just some unfortunate hardware problems that could happen to anyone. Thankfully, all I really ended up losing was my Minecraft world, which I wasn't all that attached to anyway

//I learned the mistake of forgetting to save and backup my data, trust me

[girl4music]

If you put your owned shit in “the cloud”, you are essentially transferring ownership of your owned shit to someone else. Another company. I get constantly asked by Apple if whether I want to put my beloved music files, video files and photo files in “the cloud” to save on data and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve had to email them to tell them to stop sending me automated notices asking me if I want to do this. I obviously don’t. I like to own my shit. I don’t do streaming or “cloud serving” or whatever you fucking call it. I don’t ever spend money for a company to let me have access to my shit that I already own as it is.

I have all my owned shit on my phone and laptop as well as physical media like DVDs/CDs. My advice is if you can’t afford to do that - buy an external hardrive and backup your files on that. There’s some really cute small ones these days that can pack a lot of storage in like Samsung’s T5 SSD. That does over 2 terabytes.

There are ways around it. Yes, you still have to pay money, but at least you’re paying for something reliable and that you can have access to whenever you want without the worry of privacy and confidentiality.

“The cloud” is not a convenience. It’s an incarceration.

If you’ve paid for your media, you own that media.

No if or buts about it. Tech companies can shove it. If you haven’t paid for it and you find ways to illegally access it then they have all the right in the world to come at you about it because piracy is a literal crime.

What always bothers me is they try to also do this when you have legally paid and have legal access to it.

smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud

[nowdatarecove]

 Data Recovery Company

 Our latest version of the data recovery software can reconstruct and recover damaged RAID arrays, and it does so quickly and with unique non-intrusive read-only algorithms. The best data recovery tools feature quick scans, which allow you to scan and recover recently deleted or lost files easily without impacting the state of the storage device. Whether it’s a small mistake on your computer’s hard drive or data loss in your USB flash drive or SD card, it can handle it with ease. We offer data recovery service. If you find another free data recovery software. The search function, able to search for specific file types and thus speed up the process in some cases, is another highlight, although we would have liked to see sorting and exclusion filters - Hard Disk Data Recovery.

Data Recovery is the best data recovery software for businesses that need to recover large amounts of data. It offer a wide range of features, including the ability to recover data from SSDs, and it has a very high success rate. Its advanced features include email repair, email converter, file repair, server backup, data recovery and erasure. One obvious con is the inability of this program to recover files from hard drives or portable media drives. Our Data Recovery is a free undelete program that’s really simple to use. I like that the program installed very quickly and scanned my PC in record time. Our first test on the drive where the files had simply been deleted then emptied from the recycle bin our data recovery recovered all the files with the filenames intact - SSD Data Recovery.

Our experts are always ready to effectively recover and repair your drive. Our experienced professionals analyze, fix recover data from UNIX system very effectively. There are many data recovery programs out theres on the internet that can save your important data from being entirely erased from your hard disk should problems with it persist. Our data recovery technicians recover your lost data from any kind of storage device, Email, Digital Media, Laptop. Recover accidentally deleted or shift deleted important files as well as emptied recycle bin unconsciously. For more information please visit our site https://www.nowdatarecovery.com/