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...does anyone have a copy of either MS or GE that I may have sent out (eiter as PDF or word/doc/openoffice) format?
...I sort of need to replace most of my files. I've got MF & MH (and the first 15k of the young!Stef book), I've got dribs and drabs of other scenes sitting in out sent box and whatnot, but I don't think I actually have a full copy of MS anywhere else (Yes. My fault. I've already beat myself up for this.)
My computer...borked and they ************** **** ****************** ******ing formatted my drive without a data recovery. I've lost a...lot of stuff, but I'm trying to be chill, and just take stock of what I need to get to be back up and running.
On top of that, I've just basically been having a really shit week for reasons I'd rather not get into on the internets, and feeling really, really uninspired. I've been at the novella, but that's just in my notebook, haven't actually had the motivation to sit and type anything up (doesn't help that my computer was at the shop for a week, and it's not as easy to type on other people's computers).
I came close to quitting last night, just everything was piled up and I'd just had the aforementioned horrible week and I just wanted to toss it all away and not bother to write anymore (yeah, yeah, you've heard this all before, doesn't mean I didn't feel that way). But saying something like that is pointless because no matter how much I can say I'm quitting, and GIVING IT UP FOREVER and emoemoemoangstbullshit, I always come back. Sometimes it takes weeks (once it took eight months), but I always come back and write. And I'll always come back and write MV, I...just don't want to write anything else, so it's not like I'd give this up, then turn around and start working on some swords-and-sorcery thing. If I'm writing, I'm writing Stef, cookies, suits and guns. Or...Mags, Taylor, sexytime and guns. :P You know what I mean.
I wanted GE to be one big book, but I think I may end up splitting it in two. Maybe just stumble through to the midway point, then actually take an official hiatus or something, it wouldn't be complete, it'd be like the end of MF or MH, as in, you know there's a lot more to come, it's a cliffhanger in certain respects, but at the same time, it's resolved to the poin where you can stand to wait a little bit.
I think this may actually be the most words I've put into one thing in ages.
So yeah...would you like two Mags books instead of one? Or would you just be happy with knowing it's halfway through and you'll get the second half in X amount of time? It's sort of semantics, but important in this case. Or not. Sometimes it's the little things that count.
From a logistics and style point of view, two makes more sense to me, just in case you ever feel like doing more Mags books. Barring that as a possibility, or simply disagreeing with my tastes, there is nothing wrong with putting the one book on hold for a while.
I'm sorry that stuff is shitty for you, especially with the computer. I've been pretty fortunate in that my computers all take the long agonizing path to death so there are no surprises, and, well, not using my computer for anything important. My point is, I think, that my limited troubles with computers have been pretty unfortunate for me and that I have a lot of sympathy for your comparatively major troubles.
Uh... positive ending... puppies, bunnies and kittens! With Merlin!
...will certainly be doing more Mags books, just not yet if you know what I mean (like #5 is a team book, #6 is a Merlin & Jonesy book, #7 is back to Stef), the focus shifts around. I don't actually have the next Mags book planned, but the couple after that, I do. :D
Reality is a formality.
... is the story itself, so I say treat it how you feel the book(s) should be treated. This is, after all, your baby. The rest of us are just along for the ride, as amazing as its been so far and promises to be amazing in the future.
I too can sympathize with your computer problems, I've actually been forced to use my friend's pc for these past months as my personal machine had a sudden critical meltdown and I still can't afford the parts to repair it. While I've never used my pc for a major project or anything, I practically live on the internet and I feel like a part of me is missing until I get it fixed. I hope you can get things running smoothly again soon and that you won't have to deal with these problems again for a very long time.
"There are two things in this world that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm only sure of the latter." - A. Einstein
If you still have the original disk (they didn't just replace it with a new one) you can try to recover the files from it. First of all: stop using the computer. Using it will overwrite data that would otherwise be recoverable. Next, get an external drive or large enough USB stick and install some recovery software, for example: http://www.piriform.com/recuva
Recuva, and a few others, but it can't even find ghosts of the files. It can on my second harddrive, but nothing on my main drive, where all the important stuff was. -_-
Reality is a formality.
If it can't find anything at all, maybe they swapped out the disks? You can always try and ask the shop you went to. With some luck they did and they still have the old disk laying around?
I'm sorry, Stormy. Hard weeks are no fun. Sad too for the writings lost, though much of the joy is in creating them.
MS and GE are still up on the website. Is it nontrivial to recover them from that, or were you looking for distributed copies of work that was not yet posted? (I could write something to get the text back from the webpages, if it would help.)
Half-books or half-written whole books are both good by me, it is a pleasure to read your work in whatever form you prefer to make it.
Cookies and rest for you, and I hope your days get better. Be blessed in your endeavors, dear Stormy.
...sent out a couple of .odt copies to various people, probably mistaken though. It was just the stuff I'd done so far (hadn't written ahead for GE or anything).
I just think there was some stuff from #7 that I lost, which is -_- (the fight scene I think I have a copy of in email, but the last conversation of the book...oooh, -_-. Let's just say if I wanted to pick a point to end the series, that convo would be it, because it just seems like a good ending, but since I have other stuff to tell, it'll just be a good end to the book).
*noms on cookie*
Reality is a formality.
Just FYI, don't want to get your hopes up too much, but, unless the drive has been wiped (which is not the same as formatted) or replaced, it might still be possible to recover at least some of your files, so long as they don't get overwritten (meaning that the more you download/save/install/etc, the smaller the chances). A normal (quick) format doesn't actually overwrite the entire disk, only small parts of it, and it is possible to read what was in the remaining parts.
Do you have some other drive you can recover data to? e.g. USB disk? (writing them to the same drive is obviously not ideal, since that might overwrite some other files you want...)
One program that is supposedly good for recovering lost files is PhotoRec [1], which despite the name can recover a lot more than just images, including msword and openoffice formats. It is available on various bootable rescue CDs, e.g. PartedMagic [2] or S.T.D. [3], and as a downloadable executable [4] (if you have an existing system you want to use it with).
I don't have anything more of MV than what's on this site, but if recovery fails and noone else has it either, I (like goll.ioth apparently) can help with copying text from the website into other formats.
[1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
[2] http://partedmagic.com/
[3] http://s-t-d.org/
[4] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
...but now it's back to not working again. As in, I boot it and get nothing more than a pretty starfield at the point where it's supposed to be getting into Windows, so apparently they didn't really fix anything. -_-
Gonna take it somewhere else to see if they can do anything with it, and in a few months, I'll just buy myself a new compy. Or take Matthew's and buy him a new one. >_>
Reality is a formality.
that sucks. Sounds like they promptly forgot about your actual problem and just treated it like a format-and-reinstall request, with little to no actual testing/fixing...
Since nothing was found (ref earlier answer) I guess they either replaced the disk or did a proper wipe too. :(
edorfaus: agreed. |(
Stormy:
I'm very sorry to hear that you lost some of your original work.
What pisses me off is how you lost it.
Please never take your personal machine to a "IT Professional" ever again!
Why?
Because there is no such profession!
"Wipe and reinstall windows" is the standard "fix" for so many problems that it's embarrassing. The small computer shops who will do this make most of their money this way. They have a vested interest in NOT fixing the way the industry is.
You just can't trust such people to act professionally while fixing something for someone they don't know.
Those working in IT have no enforced code of ethics, and simply do what "everyone else does".
What's worse, is that the biggest trend setter in that industry is demonstrably corrupt. The hardest lie to catch is spoken by one who honestly doesn't believe s/he is lying. Couple that with our tendency to be most likely to believe against evidence whatever we most or least want to be true, and you have a recipe for disaster. This means that well-meaning but deluded people in the "IT support industry" will either not look too closely, or will rabidly defend said trendsetter. They will do their best, but ultimately they're fighting a losing battle.
"Oh, I'm sorry, but you should have had backups. Computers just aren't reliable you know" Bah...
Who you really want to hire, is a chartered engineer.
But they are too busy and too expensive to do PC repairs. Your best bet is to find an amateur willing to help. If people here are giving advice non-gratis, listen. They may or may not be working in IT, but that doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing. And if they're here, then they do care about you, and will go the extra distance.
My advice - anger is a healthy alternative to depression. More especially so if it's justified.
Something to keep in mind for the future though - "flash" technology is a few orders of magnitude more reliable than hard disk.
Something else to keep in mind - your work is only going to improve as you learn and grow as an author. You've clearly already found that anything worth inventing once, is worth reinventing to get it "right". A key tenet of the true craftsmen.
Please get and learn LaTeX, please use it to get your work into .pdf
How much one can make off one's creative endeavors doesn't actually depend just on how good it is but mostly (sadly) on how well you are known. So get 'em in pdf and spread 'em far and wide. Maybe put 'em all into .torrent on TPB.
Your work is good, and it is worthy of being better known.
Just look at doing a small run of hard copies, and price 'em high - or let those buying decide the price, so we can price it high for you.
You are a good writer, and the only reason you need a day job is just that you aren't a household name yet.
Keep at it and you'll win out in the end!
agreed with everything
EXCEPT putting things into .pdf. ugh.
Free online fiction and hosting of YOUR fiction,
www.dreamfantastic.com
edorfaus: agreed. |(
Stormy:
I'm very sorry to hear that you lost some of your original work.
What pisses me off is how you lost it.
Please never take your personal machine to a "IT Professional" ever again!
Why?
Because there is no such profession!
"Wipe and reinstall windows" is the standard "fix" for so many problems that it's embarrassing. The small computer shops who will do this make most of their money this way. They have a vested interest in NOT fixing the way the industry is.
You just can't trust such people to act professionally while fixing something for someone they don't know.
Those working in IT have no enforced code of ethics, and simply do what "everyone else does".
What's worse, is that the biggest trend setter in that industry is demonstrably corrupt. The hardest lie to catch is spoken by one who honestly doesn't believe s/he is lying. Couple that with our tendency to be most likely to believe against evidence whatever we most or least want to be true, and you have a recipe for disaster. This means that well-meaning but deluded people in the "IT support industry" will either not look too closely, or will rabidly defend said trendsetter. They will do their best, but ultimately they're fighting a losing battle.
"Oh, I'm sorry, but you should have had backups. Computers just aren't reliable you know" Bah...
Who you really want to hire, is a chartered engineer.
But they are too busy and too expensive to do PC repairs. Your best bet is to find an amateur willing to help. If people here are giving advice non-gratis, listen. They may or may not be working in IT, but that doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing. And if they're here, then they do care about you, and will go the extra distance.
My advice - anger is a healthy alternative to depression. More especially so if it's justified.
Something to keep in mind for the future though - "flash" technology is a few orders of magnitude more reliable than hard disk.
Something else to keep in mind - your work is only going to improve as you learn and grow as an author. You've clearly already found that anything worth inventing once, is worth reinventing to get it "right". A key tenet of the true craftsmen.
Please get and learn LaTeX, please use it to get your work into .pdf
How much one can make off one's creative endeavors doesn't actually depend just on how good it is but mostly (sadly) on how well you are known. So get 'em in pdf and spread 'em far and wide. Maybe put 'em all into .torrent on TPB.
Your work is good, and it is worthy of being better known.
Just look at doing a small run of hard copies, and price 'em high - or let those buying decide the price, so we can price it high for you.
You are a good writer, and the only reason you need a day job is just that you aren't a household name yet.
Keep at it and you'll win out in the end!
Computer fixers: I've never had a good experience dealing with these people. Quick poll, has anyone here found good computer people? 'Cause if not, it's an interesting market to try to fill. And if so, maybe I'll go to them next time I ... just for example ... go biking through the rain with my laptop.
Distribution: I kinda like this site, rather than redistributing as pdf's and such. I like the comment-conversations, and the chapters occasionally get edited for typos and such. Maybe I've missed out on a distribution trend, but I generally prefer links to pdf downloads anyway.
Double-post: possibly just an upload error, but possibly 'cause Vampires' posts have to be reviewed before being uploaded. Spambot protection, or some such. Clearly this means you should make an account, so we can hug you and give you cookies.
Does it count if I AM a computer fixer? I have a good experience with myself. Does that count? Of course, I do everything I can to figure out what exactly is going wrong with things. I hate not knowing something that I know I can figure out. If I am pressured to get something done right then and there, I can see fixing it with a wipe and reinstall. Rather actually fix it though. Sometimes, that can take time that people don't want to wait for. Sorry, I am rambling. I will just stop now.
And bah, this is a perfectly good place to ramble. The house of the story with crazy characters is accepting of all readers. Come humble, bring cookies, feel free to ramble always.
Any suggestions, when fixing a computer, other than googling the problem? I'm always tempted to go "learn computers in entirety", but never sure where to start. And I don't have the free time to just read everything in alphabetical order. (Yet)
Sorry it took so long to respond here. RL got in the way of allowing me time online. To be honest, this sounds like they completely swapped out your hard drive. They could have decided that there was a problem with the drive itself and gave you a new one. That has happened before. Some places, if they have to "wipe and restore", they put in a new hard drive as it is faster, and then pop that drive in a machine and wipe it clean and install windows again there. It is faster for them, so they can get faster turn-around for their customers. They give the same size and brand of hard-drive, so most people are unaware that anything happened to their drive. I didn't agree with half the things most places do for computer repairs, which is why I got out of it and got into the University setting. Since there are only 2 of us for several departments, it makes things easier to make sure I can do what I want to do for repairs.
... as explicitly as NOT a computer-fixer. i gave up on that long ago. i make excuses for everyone (friends/family) about fixing computers.
Windows is broken software not meant to be fixed because lots of money is involved. i don't fight the losing battle, i gave up long ago. i give only 3 advices:
A. reboot
B. reinstall
C. use another OS
i cannot and will not spend my time fighting the losing battle. ( i chose C (eventually) I've been windows-FREE since two-thousand-and-THREE.
there, i'm sorry, but i had to say it.
PS: i think a computerfixer is the worst IT job out there, worse than phone support and sales.
AL13N is my name and head-biting is my game.
i'm a fan of xp, sp 2 (3 made it too vista like). There are a lot of idiosyncrasies to it, but at least I generally know what an error means, where to look, and its almost always an incompatibility between a 3rd party piece of hardware and a 3rd party piece of software. Whereas macs never tell you what an error is, so many settings that are right there in windows require actually hacking the resource fork of files, and they unabashedly don't do any work to make their system compatible with third party anything.
Free online fiction and hosting of YOUR fiction,
www.dreamfantastic.com
...to distribute PDFs once I make them, but I wanted to do an edit before doing wider distribution (because ideally I'd put them up on a few other sites at the same time), and I don't want to subject other people to the typos that you guys have learned to live with. >_<
Reality is a formality.
if you had the money, whcy i know you don't, a data recovery service can retrieve it even if overwritten.
that said, this is why i post EVERYTHING i do to a webforum i run under a my eyes only account, and the databaseteh forum runs off of backs up and emails itself to a gmail just for that purpose at midnight every night. might want to look at a similar setup. also, theres some backup software that lets you set certain folders to auto backup on the web, and gives you 2 gigs free.
on writing, Robert Heinlein wrote a short story to make a mortgage payment, said, I can do this, make a little money. He wrote a few more and a novel to pay off his house. Then said, I'm done. Don't need to write anymore. Took 8 months, till he started waking up in cold sweats, had the shivers, ect. Writing is a monkey, one you start doing some serious writing, it is addictive. I get shooting headaches now and then that only go away if i block out a scene,or do a character skecth, at least.
Free online fiction and hosting of YOUR fiction,
www.dreamfantastic.com
...and I just have to get something out, like that outline I stuck down in the forums, it wouldn't get out of my head until I wrote it out.
Reality is a formality.
... really familiar. I guess most creative people get that sometimes, no matter the field - I certainly get ideas in my head sometimes that just won't leave me alone until I've at least mostly coded them up...
Can make it difficult to get anything done on what I was supposed to work on. :P
that type of thing, where a single idea takes precedence over everything else, is a symptom of, depending on who you talk with, psycopathy, creative genius, just plain genius, autism, adhd, and being touched by the gods.
I have something similar, only, if i get an idea in my head that does that, i have a fuse running, and if i dont get it out before the line burns away, POOF, the idea is gone, never to return.
Free online fiction and hosting of YOUR fiction,
www.dreamfantastic.com
a data recovery service can retrieve it even if overwritten.
Actually, no, that's just a myth. See here.
Recovering overwritten files is one thing, that can be fairly easy (in some circumstances - namely when only the name is actually overwritten on disk) - but recovering data from an overwritten disk is completely different.
IIRC, there was a theoretical method for doing it on older drives, using a kind of magnetic microscope I think, and some studies that I think showed it possible in small scale - but, and this is a large but, that assumed several things, that are unlikely to be the case here, among them that those sectors were never written to before the desired data was written, and then only overwritten once afterwards. It also required taking the drive apart and imaging it, and then post-processing far more data than the drive could hold, and even then was really only probabilistic (it did not always recover the data correctly). Also, the paper suggesting it wasn't actually going for a way to recover data, but for a way to securely erase it.
Further, the method only worked on older drives - with modern ones (ATA drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15GB)), clearing and purging have apparently converged (according to NIST Special Publication 800-88).
I recall hearing about (but can't seem to find the page now) someone who offered a fairly sizable reward, plus public (third-party) recognition of their recovery abilities, for just that - they had a brand new and perfectly working hard disk drive, had written some files on it, and then had overwritten it just once. They were willing to send the disk to any serious data recovery company who was willing to try, and called up several of the major ones themselves - but none of them, once they heard what had actually been done to the disk (a simple overwrite with zeros using dd, iirc), even wanted to try...
I consider that fairly strong evidence that they know that they can't do it (at least economically).
there is a way, and yes, it does involve cracking the hard drive open and using a different tool to read it. I'll find a source on it, but i read that they successfully recovered data that had been overwritten with a randomizer 10 times. It involves the fact that there is a big difference between on and off when you read it with a more sensitive tool. Takes some math, but they are able to tell the last several states of each bit store site.
this site talks about a specific overwrite method to prevent that from working.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
Free online fiction and hosting of YOUR fiction,
www.dreamfantastic.com
The link you gave is to the same paper that my link was talking about, and the recovery method it refers to isn't valid for modern drives.
The version your link points to states, at the top, "This paper is now more than fifteen years old, and discusses disk storage technology that was current 15-20 years ago." - and in the epilogue, "it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques." (notice the "perhaps"), and that the drives the paper is about are "long since extinct".
See also the "Further Epilogue" section, in particular at the end of it, where the author quotes some much more recent advice he gave someone else on the subject: "Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging."
There might be some other way, I have no proof it is impossible - but I have not (yet) seen any proof that it is possible, either (with current tools) - and more importantly for the original point, haven't seen any data recovery firms offering such a service (though I'll admit I haven't looked very hard for it).
Edit: Oh, and also - if overwritten not exactly 10 times, but an unknown number of times (I'll accept the limitation that this number is less than 10), with an unknown number of earlier writes - how would they know which set of data to recover? And for that matter, how would they figure out which write of this sector corresponds to which write of the next? Can they even figure out the order of those 10 writes? Lots of details that would make practical data recovery quite difficult... Although I suppose your source might have addressed these things already...
not sure, but don't journalling file systems store the last X writes?
AL13N is my name and head-biting is my game.
Well, yes, but not the way you're probably thinking. A journaling file system doesn't really keep multiple copies of the data, it's just that it stores the writes to the journal first, before storing them in the "real" file system. (A journaling file system is basically two parts put together, a "normal" file system, plus an area set aside as a journal.) The journal is of a limited size, and once the data is written into the "real" file system, the space in the journal is reused for later data. In other words, it stores the last X writes across all files and directories (not per file), until the write is performed in the "real" file system. Also, the journal is not necessarily used for the contents of the files, in some implementations only the metadata is journaled. The intent of the journal is to keep the integrity of the file system intact if the machine crashes, to avoid half-written files and similar issues.
A related type is the log-structured file system, which removes the "real" file system and only leaves the journal (aka log), keeping everything there - somewhat simplified, any overwrites to a file here causes the file to be copied to the end of the journal, technically leaving behind an old copy of the file which could possibly be recovered - but again, the space used by that copy can be reused at any time, so it's no substitute for backups.
The same thing often happens in "normal" file systems as well, that new versions of a file are written to a new area on the disk, and the name is then updated to point to the new location - leaving the old copy around until something else overwrites it.
If you want a file system that keeps old versions of files, well, that is available - what you're after is a file system that does snapshotting. I remember reading about one that created snapshots automatically during normal operation (was it btrfs? don't really think so, but not sure). These automatic snapshots were not permanent, that is, they were automatically removed when the file system needed some more space, but as long as you didn't take too long, you could recover up to several old versions of a file. You could also make such a snapshot permanent, leaving it around until you explicitly chose to delete it.
Also - none of this really relates much to the post you replied to, as a file system cannot help you unless the drive the data is physically stored on is intact. There is a difference between overwriting a file and overwriting a block on the disk, and overwriting on the disk is what I was talking about.
i was only referring to the problem of finding where; when the journal keeps track of what blocks have been updated.
AL13N is my name and head-biting is my game.
Well, assuming what you want recovered is amongst the last things written to the file system (since it wouldn't still be in the journal otherwise), I suppose it might be possible, depending on how the journal implementation works (I'm not sure it really has to keep track of blocks, I think the data could be higher-level than that), to figure out where the data you want is stored on the disk, and concentrate recovery on that area.
Note that this assumes that you can recover the journal - which is itself stored in blocks on the disk - and if a new file system has been created on top of the original one (aka reformatting), it would not surprise me if the new journal ends up in the same location as the old one, effectively overwriting it even further...
indeed.
it doesn't help much; but i just wanted to point this out in regards to your reasoning.
AL13N is my name and head-biting is my game.
I like this idea bestest! Leaving something in the middle hanging for months would be a horrible tease. Sure a cliffhanger isn't much better but leaving something in the middle is worse to me. Anywho that's my two-bits on the books.
What one person sees as bizarre is the norm to another and what one person sees as the norm is bizarre to another, thus everything is both normal and bizarre. That's logic.
It's still the same ending either way.
It like the end of MF/MH really, those could be one big book, technically (wouldn't quite feel right though), you're left on the same cliffhanger either way, but one way you're calling it a book with a cliffie, the other way you're calling it the midway point. >_>
Reality is a formality.
leave it as is, stop writing into it and continue later. we've already waited a while, so we can wait longer.
plus a fabricated ending is a fabricated ending; don't make one if it isn't there
AL13N is my name and head-biting is my game.
...a fabricated ending as it is, well, like the original ending of GE, now it kind of marks the mid-way point.
It still really does like one big book, not two smaller ones, so I may just go on hiatus.
Reality is a formality.
Just got home from the dreaded school supplies shopping out of town, so sorry for the delay. I've got copies of both MS and GE...
You can send them to admin@requirecookie.com if it's not too much trouble. ^_^
Reality is a formality.
Ummmm, this may come off wrong but it is meant in all of the best possible ways..... if anyone here is interested in something to read in the off time there are some great stories over at ekrtales.com, the author needs a few responsive readers to stay motivated and I thought maybe......k imma shutup now.
I'm late, and everything's already been said, so just...*hugs*
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