The Letterville BullBoard: Tip for the day.

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Posted by Janette Balogh (Member # 192) on :

Push SAVE!

(grrrrrr!)

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"When Love and Skill Work Together ... Expect a Masterpiece"

Janette Balogh
Sign Studio
in Sunny Florida
jbalogh@earthlink.net
Current Pet Profile - Please send us yours!
http://www.markfair.com/nettie

Start packing and move in! It's just too easy to be a Resident!
Location, Location, Location! It's all right here!
http://www.letterhead.com/supporters

Posted by Dana Aaron on :

OOOOoooooh NETTIE!!!!!

I know EXACTLY what you mean, as I do believe my computer has been contemplating the KAMAKAZI lifestyle...

...frequent lock ups, "performing illegal operations", a color printer that won't work at all (even after SEVERAL hours long-distance with tech support & a NEW printer they sent), refusing to let me type in URLs (I have to type them somewhere else, then cut & paste)... hopefully my new monitor will arrive soon...

SOOOOOoooo I learned not only SAVE... but SAVE TO DISK...

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Dana Aaron
Sign-A-Saurus
Nevis, MN
(218)652-3839
ICQ# 37949659

Doesn't 'expect the unexpected' make the unexpected expected?

Posted by Brian Stoddard (Member # 39) on :

Digitized a complex logo, 1.5 hours later idiot Brian has not saved yet(dont like auto save) program freezes inducing catatonic state...

Amen Nettie!

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Brian Stoddard
Expressions Signs
A few puddles east of Seattle

Posted by Don Coplen (Member # 127) on :

nettie, that gives me an idea for a place to take this thread...

what was the MOST work you ever lost by forgetting to hit "save"?

i'll start with 2 1/2 hours, who can beat that? do i hear 3?

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Don Coplen aka "SaintPete"
Coplen Designs
St.Petersburg, FL dcoplen@mindspring.com

Posted by Mark Fair Signs (Member # 289) on :

just to make nettie feel better,
i worked on a large menu board layout, roughly 3 hours, and had a power outage.
wham. all that slow typing i had done was a whiff of smoke

can we say UPS device, i bought one the very next day.

mark

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Mark Fair

Mark Fair Signs
http://www.markfair.com

I Don't Work... I dis-PLAY

2162 Mt. Meigs Road
Montgomery, Alabama 36107
334-262-4449

mark@markfair.com

"Mark Fair is a Proud Contributor to The Letterhead Site!"

Posted by Tony McDonald (Member # 1158) on :

Power failures are the pits. Also if you accidentaly bump the puters off switch with your foot. But the worst for me was when I lost a Jaz drive and close to 2 gigs worth of very important tracing work. Probably weeks worth of work. I made up a lot of new words on that one. Gotta start all over. With a new Jaz Drive and a cd burner this time and making 2 copies on cd, one goes in the safe. I don't ever want that to happen again!

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When good things happen...that must be a sign!!
Tony McDonald
DBA-Ace Graphics & Printing
P.O. Box 91
Camdenton, MO. USA
(573) 346-6696
<daddyo@advertisnet.com>

Posted by Cynthia Pack (Member # 1399) on :

Why not invest in a backup system? At least get one that will whole long enough so you can save and then shut down. Also set you computer where you can automatically save every 10 minutes. This way you won't lose but the last 10 minutes of work. Back to the battery backup, you can get one for around $200.00 (watch on egghead.com not ebay). It is well worth the money. I work out of my home and we are the last ones on that circuit. We get alot of lights going out for no reason. As soon as they go out, they come back on but it is enough to lose what you are working on.

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Where the possibilities are endless

Posted by Janette Balogh (Member # 192) on :

I have a back up system for power failures.
Here in Florida, we have what's called "brown outs" frequently. An APC is a must.

Though it doesn't help when your computer crashes on an intense designing session, and you've been overlooking the save button. What a gut wrencher! The good news is .... I discovered "auto backup" in Corel today! (always a silver lining somewhere)

Thanks to those who empathized ... nice to know I'm in good company.

Nettie

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"When Love and Skill Work Together ... Expect a Masterpiece"

Janette Balogh
Sign Studio
in Sunny Florida
jbalogh@earthlink.net
Current Pet Profile - Please send us yours!
http://www.markfair.com/nettie

Start packing and move in! It's just too easy to be a Resident!
Location, Location, Location! It's all right here!
http://www.letterhead.com/supporters

Posted by Mike Pipes (Member # 1573) on :

Well, I've never lost any more than 20 minutes worth of work because of poor saving habbits, HOWEVER....

I used to do tons of 3D Modeling and animation, and part of my job at the ol' engineering firm was to create 3D Animations that were 100% accurate representations of an actual project. These animations were for presentations to show to clients.

Although I was on the company's payroll, I did have a business listed in my name and the animations were actually contract work.

One minute of completed animation was worth $5,000.

Well, when it was time to render all the scenes, I would wait until after hours when no one else was there using the machines. The animation software worked over a network, so I was able to harness the power of SIX PentiumIII 600MHz machines to do the work. Just let 'em run overnight and the next morning there would be about 3 minutes of animation sequences waiting for me to splice together.

WRONG!!

Every single machine had locked up overnight and there was no more than 15 seconds of completed animation. Had to re-render again, but the second time around it was completed. Whew!!

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Mike Pipes
Digital Illusion Custom Graphics
Lake Havasu City, AZ
http://www.stickerpimp.com

Posted by Dan Antonelli (Member # 86) on :

You know Nettie, if you had a Mac, that would never happen.

My Mac never freezes!!

Gotcha!

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Dan Antonelli
Graphic D-Signs, Inc.
Union, NJ
www.graphicd-signs.com
dan@graphicd-signs.com

"You won't get wise with the sleep still in your eyes, no matter what your dream may be" - Rush

Posted by Rick Sacks (Member # 379) on :

I don't understand it, when it dissappeared from Nettie's screen it appeared on mine, and I didn't know what it was, so I deleted it.

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The SignShop
Mendocino, California
"Where the Redwoods meet the Surf"

Posted by Bruce Jackson (Member # 45) on :

How about three weeks+ work.

Not me but a close friend. He had a motherboard failure...couldn't access his hard disk....the techie thought the disk was at fault so he stuck it in another machine and formatted it.....
ooops...no back up.

clients, adresses, email, current jobs, clients artwork from the last 6 months.

back em up people. Put in a second hard drive, get a burner, zip or tape, keep a copy off site too.

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Bruce Jackson
Melbourne, Australia
home.connexus.net.au/~bruceja

Posted by Nevman (Member # 332) on :

Back in '95 we were robbed. 5 machines, 3 dongles [side note: SignLab was VERY cooperative..they put me back in business with their genorosity], 4 or 5 months of unbacked-upped client files.

Get a security system now!! or a BIG dog

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Pat Neve, Jr.
Sign Man, Inc.
4580 N. US 1
Melbourne, FL 32935
321-259-1703
signman@signmaninc.com
Capt. Sign
Letterville Constituent
constituent: "One of the individual entities contributing to a whole"

Posted by Gail & Dave Beattie (Member # 572) on :

Corel backup!!!!

make a new dir call it backups, in workspace set your backups to 10 min and tell it to put them there....
never again do you lose more than just a few mins of work from one of those unavoidable ooops, sum wally cut the power/turned on toooo many things/i bumped the switch/the bloody puter locked up.

just remember to watch the screen nettie cause when the lil hour glass starts to spin dont press too many buttons cause the poor baby will get so confused it will crash cause its trying to save and your trying to do more stuff!

sorry to hear you lost all that hard work

regards
gail

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Gail & Dave
Taurus Signcraft
Thornton NSW
Australia
taurus@hunterlink.net.au

Posted by Glenn Taylor (Member # 162) on :

Wanna try for 12 years worth? hehehe.

When we were hit with the flood last year, we lost every hard-drive, Zip, floppy and backup tape. The only thing to survive were the CD's.

If ya wanna do as safe a backup as possible, burn CDs. I wish I had.

And as for auto-backups as in Corel, SignLab has it. I've also e-mailed Gerber about putting it in Omega. Heaven knows, auto-backup would save everyone a lot of headaches regardless of what software is used.

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Compost Happens!

:) Design is Everything! :)
Glenn Taylor
in beautiful North Carolina

http://members.tripod.com/taylor_graphics
walldog@geeksnet.com

Posted by Rick Sacks (Member # 379) on :

I personally don't like auto back-ups Too many times I want to get back to where I was and couldn't.

As far as back ups for long term security, we do back up tapes and rotate them always keeping one copy for each system in the house and one at the shop.

Murphy's Law can still get us.

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The SignShop
Mendocino, California
"Where the Redwoods meet the Surf"

Posted by Pierre St.Marie (Member # 1462) on :

We don't write anything to the hard drive. We installed a "zip drive" and write everything there. We write a backup zip once a week and all of this leaves the main c drive free and fast. Not as free and fast as Rick's bare feet........but close.

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St.Marie Graphics
& Makin' Tracks Sound Studio
Kalispell, Montana
stmariegraphics@centurytel.net http://www.stmariegraphics.com
We're chiseling every day of the week! :^)

Posted by Deb Fowler (Member # 1039) on :

PUSH SAVE

TO

FLOPPY OR CD! GRRRRREAT NOW.

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Deborah Fowler
Creative Signs, Ohio
"Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day: Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime."

Posted by Mike Pipes (Member # 1573) on :

I'd be REAL careful about using ZIP's as backup and/or for the working files.
Zip's DO have a tendency to fail, quite often actually when they are used extensively.
Just use your favorite search engine and do a search for "Click of Death". You will be treated to many unhappy customer complaints as well as class action lawsuits filed against Iomega, before they decided to replace clicking ZIP's no questions asked.

For a TRULY reliable backup, use a tape, Jaz, or another hard drive. Using a tape or another hard drive allows you to make a COMPLETE copy of your current system setup.. not just artwork files, but everything including the operating system, all software, files.. preferences.. everything.

CD's are OK, but only OK and definitely not exceptional. CD-R's are WORM's (Write Once Read Many).. obviously you cannot re-write to a CD-R. CD-RW's can be touchy, and heaven forbid the machine locks up while writing to one of these discs, the disc will be rendered unuseable. When I first got a CD-RW it was an HP 7200i model, and I was stupid enough to use it for the only location of some particular working files that were just my favorite 3D Models, and I lost the disc merely because the software that wrote the disc hung up for a BRIEF moment..

A good investment would be a FireWire or USB interface for your machine.. MAC users are lucky, they already come standard.. hehe..
This interface allows you to plug in an external (and probably VERY portable) hard drive very easily, where you can back up the ENTIRE contents of the main hard drive in seconds.

For those that have SCSI interfaces (I do! I do!) on their machines, you already have a handy port on the rear of the computer where you can plug in another HD and back up/copy data.

This is how I do it. Inside the machine, I have two 18 Gig SCSI harddrives. One drive contains all the software, the other holds all the working files and swap files for virtual memory. Setting it up this way sometimes helps the performance since one harddrive isnt looking for software information and the art file info at the same time on the same disk. Instead one drive works on the software demands, the other drive is writing the actual files and shrinking/enlarging the swapfiles.

ANyways... sitting in the closet inside a firebox is another HD. This one is another SCSI drive at 36 Gigs, and it plugs into the external SCSI port on my computer. It stays plugged in most of the day, and at times when the computer isnt being used, data is being backed up onto that drive. The entire computer system gets backed up everyday onto that drive. At the end of the day, the drive gets unplugged and locked away in the firebox.

For the non-computer techie peoples, SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface, and usually means superior (FAST) performance and much higher reliability. Graphics workstations can often benefit from these kinds of drives, mostly when using extremely large bitmap files.
I've been running SCSI equipment in my computers for the past 8 years and I have never had a failure or malfunction of any type with the exception of that CD-RW which wasnt SCSI.

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Mike Pipes
Digital Illusion Custom Graphics
Lake Havasu City, AZ
http://www.stickerpimp.com

Posted by mike meyer (Member # 542) on :

SALVE!!!!! Grain Belt is my choice. (Save Salve?) Yeah!

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Mike Meyer SignPainter
575 1st Street Box 3
Mazeppa, Mn 55956
(507) 843-5951
EMail-mikemeyer@sleepyeyetel.net Check out this crazed man's web site he's doing fur me.....http://www.markfair.com/mikemeyer

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