Saturday, October 11, 2008

I'm looking for suggestions...

Well, I finally heard back from the computer shop about my dinosaur computer. It is officially DEAD! The hard drive gave up the ghost and nothing was able to be saved. Eight years worth of e-mails from family, friends, and class lectures.!

I had backed up everything except the stuff in Outlook (I don't know how to back it up), until a few months ago. I'm still trying to figure out what to do about my e-mail for the future. I'm afraid to download from my ISP to Outlook without knowing how to back them up on my external hard drive.

After having the old hard drive turn into slag, and losing all of my e-mail and addys, I need to figure out an alternative to Outlook if I can't learn how to back it up. I like it because I can have sub-files within files. I can't do that at Yahoo. G-Mail is a little better. If anyone has any smart ideas, I am open to suggestions for online storage of e-mail. HELP!

The moral to this tale of woe... learn how to back EVERYTHING up!

Happy computing,

Frances

Writing Science Fiction Romance
Real Love in a Real Future

5 comments:

Heather Massey said...

Oh, that bites. Well, I guess you can look forward to a shiny new model! Wish I could be more of a help re: Outlook, but I was in the same situation once. Fingers crossed for you.

D L Jackson said...

I back up everything two ways now. I had a chapter I woke up at 3 in the morning, inspired to write and couldn't wait. It was beautiful, it was cleaver, it was the dreaded chapter 12. I saved to a disc, I saved to a travel drive and to my hard drive.
I lost the chapter at all three places. The disc became corupted, the travel drive got lost and the computer dumped that chapter.
I re-wrote and again the blasted computer dumped it.
I learned from a friend to send work to my gmail. It has massive storage, if your computer crashes, you can retreive it from any computer that's online and it's easy to send the file.
I still use a travel drive to back up, but I now place it in the same location at home. It fell out of my purse before. So if I'm out and about, like the library, all the backup goes to gmail.
As for the dreaded chapter 12.
It's cursed I tell you. Before I was done, I re-wrote that chapter five times from scratch. I finally re-named it chapter 13 and skipped chapter 12. It is no longer in that story. I have the header and a disclaimer as to why it's not there. Finally, I didn't lose it. It's not the first time I've had trouble with chapter 12 in a story. I've had problems with it with two other novels. I'm not superstious, really I'm not, but in this case, I'm just not tempting fate anymore.LOL
Anyway, lesson learned. No more chapter 12s, you won't see them in my stories, I skip them and only give them a heading. And...back it all up to gmail.
Dawn

Frances said...

Heather and Dawn,

Thanks for the sympathy. Oh poor Dawn, ((((HUGS)))). Your Ch 12s are snakebit. You've had it a lot worse than I have. I've used Yahoo, and will investigate Google.

I've used Yahoo Bookmarks. Since I lost all my IE Favorites, I am looking for another online bookmark storage system. Any suggestions? Thanks for all your help.

Melanie Atkins said...

I use storage on Yahoo, gmail, and external drives. Thunderbird is my email program (I love it) but I save my favorite mail to files outside of the program in My Documents, so they're backed up on my external drive.

Frances said...

Melanie,

I'm going to be using Yahoo storage, and I'll be checking out Google storage. The external hard drive looks like the only alternative.

How does one save Outlook E-mail to the external hard drive, and how does one open the files to read them later? I have a whole pile stacked up at the ISP because I haven't solved this problem yet. The only e-mail that I have saved is that which I copied into Word Documents, and had on my laptop. *Sigh* All addys gone. :-(