Have you ever lost several hours worth of work because of some sort of bug, crash or your own stupidity?
I have, just now.
I was going to send you a lighthearted email with some cartoons and an animation as a grand finale. The animation was done, I just wanted to crop and export it when software crashed, art disappeared and tears were shed.
I don’t like to listen to myself when I’m grumpy and tired and I’m sure you don’t like to read my writing when I’m like this.
So instead what I’d like to do is hand the mic to you! Have you ever had a digital tragedy that cost you several hours of your day? Tell me about it in a comment below!
Heel herkenbaar, maar het maakt jou niet minder mooi als mens. Ik geniet altijd van de herkenbare dingen die je meemaakt, en ook dit.. ook al was het niet zo bedoelt, misschien raak je er wel extra door geïnspireerd! Keep the spirit and creativity up! Liefs
Late to the party but had to share this one. Early in my career while doing web development at a university, I had just deployed a website redesign for one of our art schools. Immediately after sending an email to the chair and other stakeholders that we were live, I noticed a spelling error on the site. No big deal. Just fix it in the code and (because this was early days when git was still pretty new) upload the changes directly to the server. Go check the web to make sure they worked and there's the old site design?
I had overwritten the new site with the old code. My only backup was from over a month ago...
I spent the rest of the day frantically rewriting a month's worth of work.
I have never worked (on code) without version control again.
Ooooh, the horror! It always strikes me how fast the second time around is though. Hours of work is often redone in twenty minutes. And sometimes even better...
Not quite like yours.. but as a teacher very often i spend lots of hours preparing for the lessons that seem to me like a piece of art. And in the class it appears a complete failure!!! Such a bummer. Sorry for yout time...
During my academic studies I deleted a term paper after a weekend of writing day and night. On the morning of due date.
After some time of shock, I realized that I had already sent out the digital copy to my teacher and so was able to restore the paper from my outbox. Lucky me.
One time I overwrote the final version of my novel with a previous version on Scrivener. I will never know if the rewrite I did after that matches the original final version that I had. And I know I loved the last line!
In my experience, if I have to redo 4 hours of work, I'm often able to do in less than have the time with a better result. But don't remind me I said this minutes after I lost hours of work...
I've had many a work day where Microsoft Word crapped out on me and I lost several hours of a court brief. Even with all of the redundant file management systems, there always seems to be a way where things fall through into the unrecoverable abyss!
On the writing side, I was editing my book when my computer crashed and when I went to open Scrivener on restart, the program wouldn't open the file. This way days before I needed to format the book and submit it to a contest so I was flipping out that my book was suddenly inaccessible. Thankfully, I was able to re-open the file after several hours.
Ack. Noooo! Or, rather, yes, I've had a like-minded tragedy. Most of them happened back in my university days with old school computers and saving to floppies, but in more recent times a computer crash and a number of lost files/projects forced me to ensure everything lives in the cloud. I'm sure that'll come to bite me in the butt eventually, but that's where we are for now. Good luck!
Heel herkenbaar, maar het maakt jou niet minder mooi als mens. Ik geniet altijd van de herkenbare dingen die je meemaakt, en ook dit.. ook al was het niet zo bedoelt, misschien raak je er wel extra door geïnspireerd! Keep the spirit and creativity up! Liefs
Ps: een kop thee of een glas wijn helpt altijd 😘
Thanks! En ja voor wijn! 😊
Late to the party but had to share this one. Early in my career while doing web development at a university, I had just deployed a website redesign for one of our art schools. Immediately after sending an email to the chair and other stakeholders that we were live, I noticed a spelling error on the site. No big deal. Just fix it in the code and (because this was early days when git was still pretty new) upload the changes directly to the server. Go check the web to make sure they worked and there's the old site design?
I had overwritten the new site with the old code. My only backup was from over a month ago...
I spent the rest of the day frantically rewriting a month's worth of work.
I have never worked (on code) without version control again.
Sorry for you loss :(
Ooooh, the horror! It always strikes me how fast the second time around is though. Hours of work is often redone in twenty minutes. And sometimes even better...
Not quite like yours.. but as a teacher very often i spend lots of hours preparing for the lessons that seem to me like a piece of art. And in the class it appears a complete failure!!! Such a bummer. Sorry for yout time...
I had created the whole flow for a client demo and my ETL software crashed just day before the demo, their was no backup
Did you pull an all nighter?
I did , yet could not really create all the flows perfectly. Happens
Sorry you lost your work; the resulting gif is still amazing though!!
This is basically every other day of my life when Maya crashes :')
3D art has taught me much about heartbreak and patience lol
Thanks! I might like this quick animation more than the one I had been working on for hours... :D
During my academic studies I deleted a term paper after a weekend of writing day and night. On the morning of due date.
After some time of shock, I realized that I had already sent out the digital copy to my teacher and so was able to restore the paper from my outbox. Lucky me.
One time I overwrote the final version of my novel with a previous version on Scrivener. I will never know if the rewrite I did after that matches the original final version that I had. And I know I loved the last line!
In my experience, if I have to redo 4 hours of work, I'm often able to do in less than have the time with a better result. But don't remind me I said this minutes after I lost hours of work...
I've had many a work day where Microsoft Word crapped out on me and I lost several hours of a court brief. Even with all of the redundant file management systems, there always seems to be a way where things fall through into the unrecoverable abyss!
On the writing side, I was editing my book when my computer crashed and when I went to open Scrivener on restart, the program wouldn't open the file. This way days before I needed to format the book and submit it to a contest so I was flipping out that my book was suddenly inaccessible. Thankfully, I was able to re-open the file after several hours.
Oh wow. I’m glad you were able to recover that! I’m pretty good with making back-ups usually, but I’ve lost so much work nevertheless.
Yeah I now have Google Drive backing up my work constantly but I think this happened before I implemented that. Sorry about your lost animation!
Ack. Noooo! Or, rather, yes, I've had a like-minded tragedy. Most of them happened back in my university days with old school computers and saving to floppies, but in more recent times a computer crash and a number of lost files/projects forced me to ensure everything lives in the cloud. I'm sure that'll come to bite me in the butt eventually, but that's where we are for now. Good luck!
Well, clouds are great. Keeping it safe even when the house is on fire.
Not a digital one, but a physical one. Hours of work on a plate, and it fell in a gazillion pieces...it reminds me of how fragile everything is.
Noooooo!!! That’s even worse, seeing your work shattered. I’m so sorry.