The Joy of Computers

There I was, working away in my office on a paper I was writing about using the Creative Writing workshop with undergraduate students. Suddenly a little message pops up saying that the system was about to collapse, and I should save all my work. But I couldn’t do a thing, because the computer, in that application at least, had frozen completely. It did say it would attempt to save my work but then informed me that it had not managed to. I’m just hoping I’d not done too much after the last auto save, and that the auto save had worked.

I am so meticulous about backing up work. I do save everything on to my memory stick as well as whichever computer I’m working on. My home computer gets backed up to my husband’s once a week and they both get backed up to a remote mainframe once a month. The university one also does periodic back-ups, but I notice they keep some of them on the same drive as the original documents.

Yesterday I was working on a Word document on my F drive which is a virtual drive, not actually on my office computer. I was also saving to my memory stick, but I do tend to only do that at the end of a session. I fear I may have lost abut half an hour’s work.

I rebooted, and while the machine was sorting itself out, I popped into the staff room to wash my coffee cup. The head of the support staff was there and told me there had been major network problems.

I guess it might be because they were working on the library catalogue, which must take up a lot of the network. They do have to do these things sometimes. August is a good bet. The students are certainly not there, and a lot of the staff are not either.

I’ll try again today. But if it’s all not working, I’ll be off to the Imperial War Museum North to see the Horrible Histories exhibition. That does fit in very well with my research.