Remember to save to disk, and do so very often
oday in the evening (or earlier tonight) I was typing up a rather long article in Techrights, where I am the main editor.
As usual, what typically happens is, strands (or trains) of thoughts quickly become streams of words, and words add up to sentences, paragraphs, then a draft of an article. Then I go through the article, which tends to be coherent as it was typed in one go (after planning, having had some time to condition myself to put together a topic to write about in the ‘correct’ sequence), I correct typos, improve the wordings, add some more links etc. (where suitable and readily available)
I do this on a remote laptop connected over the LAN with Barrier, so if there’s a network glitch it can result in lost keystrokes and long repeated keystrokes.
Not for the first time, the latter happened when I pressed “undo” (ctrl+z), so it began undoing things I edited, in effect deleting amendments made for several minutes (far worse than when it happens with backspace as the cursor goes all over the place). Typically I’d be “hands-off” when that happens, then re-do what was omitted. This time, however, two things went wrong: 1) I did not keep “hands-off”, not long enough anyway; so I could not re-do all the way. 2) I did not press ctrl+s (save) for quite some time, so reverting back to the file on disk wasn’t a possibility either. I tried, I even did so from another laptop.
Shit!
I lost some work.
On the bright side: 1) I remembered more or less 80% or more of the changes that I made and could reconstruct a lot (with slight variation, imperfect replication, maybe even better the second time around). 2) not much was lost (either words or time). 3) it was only the editing/correcting pass, not the writing pass. 4) there was a lesson or wake-up call here. I should take advantage of it.
I will probably still take the risk of writing over Barrier, but I need to save to disk more often and be vastly more prudent/careful when undoing gets ‘jammed’. There should be a way to re-do (ctrl+shift+z) everything and, failing that, there’s a file on disk that maintains a recent copy, not what’s on the screen/buffer.
My editing skills typically use past experience (incidents) to reduce chance of loss/error, so my wife was surprised that it happened to me. Writing this blog post probably takes a lot more time than the time the incident ‘cost’ me.
I wonder if other people can relate to this.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about this (over an hour already), so documenting to myself – and maybe to others too -what happened can be hopefully prove useful.
There is no perfect (error-proof) way to edit text, but there are ways to reduce the risk and the cost of mistakes/crashes.
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N the past 2+ decades I did not lose data. Prior to that I only lost things I did not value, like old and mostly meaningless E-mails from the 1990s (not MP3s, I had those backed up). I make regular backups, I keep a spare machine in case the main one fails, and I maintain the hardware to make sure it works or be fully aware when it is about to fail. When my storage device finally failed in January 2023, for example, I had already prepared for it for about 12 months because there were warning signs. I no longer stored on it anything essential. Likewise, in 2020, I moved away from “ted” when it was giving some warnings, so when “ted” (used by me since 2013) finally died nothing of value was lost and no time wasted. I also keep external backups and we have fire extinguishing kits just in case.
