Till Shiny comes, and jars two hemispheres...

[desperance]

If there is anything better than getting tech delivered inabox, I think it might perhaps be getting tech delivered complete with its user manual, hmm....?

Still, I was bold this morning. I took tech out of its box, unwound all its cables, plugged it in. Didn't need to turn it on, it doesn't have a switch. Nice chunky bit of kit. It made a few clicky noises. Nothing else happened.

I had been kinda hoping for a sudden declaration on the screen, "You have plugged in Tech!" but no such luck.

So. I made a tentative enquiry, did the machine perhaps happen to recognise the notion of a new hard drive, external to itself...?

Yeah, sure, said the machine, shrugging mightily. So what? What do you want me to do about it?

Oh goody, quoth I. D'you think you might, y'know, copy all these files over there?

Okey-doke, quoth machine, and away it went.

Ah, Linux, how far you have come from the old days! I am still totally unused to this notion of hardware just working, straight out of the box. I do like it, though.

And now I have 400 gigs of back-up space, which I will never need; it's currently valiantly copying three years' worth of me, my entire profile on this machine and all that it contains, all my data, all my texts. In eleven gigs.

Which reminds me: jaylake posted yesterday about his back-up strategy. Which is comprehensive, but strictly electronic. I did grin when he said, "I should probably keep printouts of finished material, but even then I'd have a stack of paper at least ten thousand sheets tall."

Hah. I think it's pretty generally known hereabouts that I predate computers and electronic storage, so it's probably not a surprise that my own back-up strategy is predicated on the fixed belief that nothing is truly safe until it's solid. Ten thousand sheets, what's that? [Twenty reams, quoth smartarse.] I have hard copy of every draft of every novel. And every short story bar the early stuff, which a svengali induced me to discard twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, which I have lamented ever since. My archive is incomplete (but this is the point, or a part of it: it ain't a proper archive unless it's on paper, y'know?). I could see Jay's ten thousand sheets ten times over, and still have paper spare.

Also, this 400 gigs of storage? Cost me the same, to the penny, as the first electronic storage I ever bought: ten floppy disks, approximately that same twenty-five years ago. Um, they might have been 720K per disk? But they might not, they might have been smaller. [ETA: actually, I'm pretty damn sure they were 360K, one-sided. The machine had two floppy drives, no hard disk at all. What did I need a hard disk for? Software in one drive, data in the other and away we went...]

Comments

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

8 inch disks? When they really were floppy and came in paper half envelopes, back when Iain Banks could predicate the resolution of an entire novel on having a geek friend to pull an ascii file - bit by bit - off an unreadable 8 inch floppy (The Crow Road - one of my favourite reads)

[fjm.livejournal.com]

You do know that the modern printing ink in computer printers isn't "solid". Come back in a few years. It will be dust.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Is there such a thing as archival grade desktop printing?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

In pure terms, I'm sure not; it's about my comfort zones more than an actual security. Writerly-wise, I am that uncomfortable bridge generation: as a schoolboy I set lead type for letterpress printing; as a young pro I used a typewriter, then an electric typewriter, then an electronic, before the desktop computer materialised, and even then it was another ten years before I could inveigle a publisher into typesetting from my disk rather than rekeying. My brain can play with tech as much as it likes; my heart knows that writing is all about words on paper. All else is uncertainty. Which is grand as an intermediate stage, but never a final product.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that's observable degradation. I keep a vaguely curious eye on the backstuff, and it isn't fading yet (as opposed to some of the early paperbacks, where the paper is yellowing and turning brittle already; my manuscripts may outlast my books, which is a mildly alarming prospect). If it does start to decay, I can do something about it in plenty of time. Electronic corruption can be instant; or the tech just marches on, and you tumble out of step for a bit, and suddenly find that your only copy of something is on a medium that modern machines won't read in a format that they don't understand, and you need to find yourself a geek with an antique...

I love my tech, but paper was my first love, and I am troooooo...

[lagilman]

You do have at least two fire exits, right? Because one magnifying glass left out on a sunny day...

(I just hooked my old tower to my new tower, and will be -- at some point in my non-stressed, non-deadline driven time* -- setting Old up as a nightly storage dump. It's not perfect, but it gives me a belt and braces)




*or, more likely, I will feed my Tech Guy so he can do it for me

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I had been kinda hoping for a sudden declaration on the screen, "You have plugged in Tech!" but no such luck.

Oh come on, that's enthusiastic puppy dog behaviour, that is. And enthusiastic puppy dog behaviour is a Microsoft speciality:- just look at Word.

(Go away, you horrible mutt!)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you're right, of course. It's far cooler simply to find it there when wanted. I'm just a little insecure, is all: because I really don't know what I'm doing in Linux, even yet, I crave reassurance when I really shouldn't need it.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It's nice to have something just appear discreetly in the system tray - Windows is getting somewhat better at that sort of thing.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

I print out back-ups of all my writing. I shred it, then Daulton comes and lays on it. He rolls around on the slices of paper until the text permeates his fur. For a few days I can see traces of my words in his strips. Then, he carries it in his feline DNA until it's needed. Then he can shed or hack up a piece. Of course, when Ellen Datlow lost a piece I sent here, she didn't care for the furball. Guess she lacks the translation equipment.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. We like this. Data, thy medium is Cat...