Tragedy Strikes another Comic

[Eriol]

Well, not a death or anything, but definitely "omg this sucks hardcore" for GUComics (http://www.guforums.com/showthread.php?t=8315#8315). He lost ALL of his originals of his comics when his back-up failed while restoring his "working" computer.

From the link:

GU down for I don't know how long...

It's all gone, all 6 years of it... and all my commissions, emails, contacts...

I'm devastated. But, currently looking for answers.

With any luck I'll have the name of a good datarecovery specialist before the day is out. And, I won't get news that it's gone forever or that it's going to cost me ten thousand dollars.

That being said....

What I had for backing up my computer was a Maxtor 300Gig one touch system. When I first plugged it in everything was happy. So, I started moving stuff over to my freshly upgraded system. Halfway through reading one of the directories disaster struck. A little notification popped up telling me there was an error. From that point on the drive has been telling that there is a corrupted filestructure and that the volume is no longer readable.

Apparently backing up your computer isn't even safe.
Basically the lesson here is: back-up to MORE than one other device. Considering The Giant does his work mostly on the computer as well, I figure this is somewhat applicable.

[Greebo]

That's been updated - he didn't lose as much as he thought he did.

But it's a very important lesson for anyone who makes their living with computers, cause he sure as heck could have.

[Amotis]

That's been updated - he didn't lose as much as he thought he did.

But it's a very important lesson for anyone who makes their living with computers, cause he sure as heck could have.

I like your avatar.
That is all.

[Sylian]

The comic's are still on the site, right?
Is the originals important? What is that, early versions of the comic's?

[Eriol]

The comic's are still on the site, right?
Is the originals important? What is that, early versions of the comic's?
Using OOTS as an example, The Giant could never really produce a Book without the originals, as what gets uploaded to the site are lower-quality (image resolution I mean) than the original sources. The sources are (I assume) vector graphics, which can be blown up or shrunk easily with no quality loss, whereas when you blow up a JPG, GIF, or any pixel-based image, you get degredation and pixelation eventually. The long-and-short is that if he put the flat comic images in the quality they are on the web into a book, they'd look like crap.

Also, since The Giant uses so many pre-built poses for his comics, re-building his "database" of them would be extremely time-consuming, and it'd take MUCH longer to lay out each new comic than what it currently does.

Keeping your ORIGINAL sources is always important.

[sazzer]

One thing even more important is to make sure that you keep backups in different physical locations. There's no point in backing up onto different tapes, or hard drives, or whatever if they all get destroyed in the same fire. One of the projects that I work on, I even go far enough as to store backups on a server in a different country (Live server is in the UK, backups go on the webserver which is hosted in the US)

[soni]

Toast smish!

[The Prince of Cats]

I once lost a year's work inexplicably. I mean it just disappeared overnight, along with the directory it was in. The memory it had once inhabited was over-written and no undelete utility in the world could bring it back.

Now, all important work is backed up on two hard-drives, in two pcs, then on a USB stick. That makes 4 copies of the file.

[Jack Squat]

We were using Microsoft Access in one of my classes and I somehow managed to crash the server from my terminal (the main computer is in a different room) It took a good couple of minutes to get the now cleared database back up, and that was only because my neighbor accidentally saved a copy onto his computer.

[Ian]

I work as an IT consultant and broker for hardware, software, networking...the whole kit and kaboodle.

Whenever I have a client tell me that they want to buy a new server, my first question to them is:

How are you backing up this server?

It's shocking how many businesses still don't do regular back-ups of their data.