I did well in the first masters unit, even after having to re-design and restart my artefact mid-semester. Lucky for me I write like a man possessed by the ghost of a 1920’s hack writer on Adderall.

Second unit is on experimental writing (an area I think I’ll excel in) and I was really enjoying the material. Then tragedy struck. My SSD started misbehaving. Being the obsessive I am I had backups up the wazoo.

Imagine my surprise to discover that was not enough.

Evidently SSD’s can gradually fail with no indication that they are about to other than the occasional error message on sign-out. As I only keep backups for the previous month this meant that the corrupted (ie. bad) sectors went largely unnoticed until the failure was obvious. I backup data files/folders I’m using (eg Scrivener folders, image downloads, works-in-progress, Thunderbird profile) but only do a full operating system backup monthly (unless I’m really busy in which case fortnightly).

So I’d completed two weeks of the unit and was all guns blazing when the SSD failed. I went to my backup and low and behold it had a problem to. I ended up using a backup from 3 months ago and then had to import everything into it slowly.

This wasted almost a week and then the first assessment was due. Luckily the Scrivener outline and all my notes imported fine and I was able to get going from where I left off with only a three weeks worth of transcriptions and notes lost.

I used the week off to redo the notes/transcriptions and have finally caught up. Hopefully I can put up some of the work I’ve done over the weekend.

The worst part of all this, the HDD I’m using at the moment stopped randomly yesterday so I don’t know if I’m going to have to do something like this all again (yep, backups are up to date and I’m running daily checks to verify everything is fine).