Sorry about missing Friday’s update. I know some of you worry when I don’t post anything. Let me tell you what happened.
As some of you know I’ve been working hard to finish up the new Modest Medusa book. As I was assembling the book I kept coming across missing files. Or not coming across them, I guess. Some of the missing files were obviously the result of my own errors (saving over older files and bad file management) and some were corrupt, but several were just missing. After encountering the first of these I went through 170ish files that would be used in the book and discovered that a handful were corrupt or missing and would have to be re-drawn. That was a pain in the ass, but not a huge deal.
However, as the project progressed I kept encountering more and more missing files. I thought I was going crazy. Files I was SURE I had seen at the beginning of the project were now gone or corrupted. I ended up re-drawing over 20 pages before finally wrapping up the project. My last step was to add the new 8 page story I had created just for this book to the project file. But… 7 of those 8 files were now missing too!
I’m not entirely sure what’s happening. At first I assumed that the older page files (from 2015 and 2016) had been corrupted at some point in the past and that the damage was done and over. But now it seems clear that the problem is ongoing and effecting recently created and accessed files. I’ve purchased a new hard drive which I hope will solve the problem, and in the meantime I’m moving all files to an external hard drive I use for backups. I keep backups on both that HD and Dropbox, but unfortunately those are just copies of the already corrupted files.
Anyway, I got so wrapped up in losing a bunch of files that I completely forgot I was supposed to be working on a new page for last Friday. It didn’t even occur to me until someone asked about it on Friday evening. Sorry about that.
Its not clear to me how many pages I’ve lost to this problem. I’m afraid I’ll find out its a lot. Right now I’m only look at files for the Season 5 book, but once I have time I’ll need to go through my entire archive. I’m dreading what I’ll find.
Yeah, that’s how I’d react too
You know what they say when you assume.
Kids sure know how to scare themselves.
That sounds like a virus. Did you run the antivirus?
I did. No results.
If it doesn’t try to scam you for money or mine bitcoins on your PC, it’s probably not a virus — we’re not in the 90’s anymore. Most likely your hard drive is dying, or perhaps it’s a filesystem bug? Try running a disk-checking utility.
Yeah, that was bound to happen eventually, huh? Modest, maybe you should explain more clearly? And maybe attempt to addres the “monster” directly?
I agree that it really does sound like a hard drive fault. Get those backups done ASAP, and don’t do any new work until that’s finished!
Very best of luck!
As a fellow creative pro, there is nothing like that sinking pit of the stomach feeling when you get the first inkling of a data corruption problem… it’s Oh God Oh God Oh God ….
I long since got RELIGION about backups, with a THREE tier backup scheme and sometimes shizzz still goes sideways. Lost an entire folder of clients work in a system upgrade, didn’t notice till said client needed a reprint of some of their work… OH SHI—
Only two kinds of computer users – those who have lost data, and those … who will.
After knowing that radiation can break bytes (physically damaging hard drive, corrupting files), i am worried what causing massive file corruption in your case.
Oh, thats upsetting to think about.
Yeah teeth are much harder than bones and are usually the last thing left after bugs eat the skeleton.
Something’s occurred to me about the toothfacer’s (I think that it’s called) biology as a gestalt organism, are the millipedes and what I think are cockroaches some specific species that are unique to the colonial organism, or are those placeholders and it can just assimilate anything considered to be bugs that happen to be around? And what about the tongue, bones, and maybe eyes? Is the tongue some sort of slug like creature? Are the bones organisms grown during development and maintained by the bugs? Or maybe built like termite mounds and honeycomb? Are the eyes just bugs peeping out of the skull and relaying info to the swarm or something else? Okay that’s several things, I’m the kinda guy who asks this kinda stuff.
I think the Toothfacer starts out as a bag of mostly bugs and slowly develops organs and bones of its own. Its not clear what all the teeth are for. I think it can be any type of bugs.
Oh so it’s a strictly magic thing, okay. Glad to see that you’ve have a chance to reply, hope this computer problem thing turns out okay soon.
I’ll have an update on the computer stuff on Sunday. I appreciate everyone’s advice.
If you are using Dropbox for backups, you should be able to log in to the web interface and see recently-deleted files as long as they were sync’d at least once. On the basic plan, you have 30 days worth of previous history.
So if the files are flat-out disappearing, and any of it happened recently, you should be able to get to them.
For the corrupted files, if the files were recently corrupted (rather than being corrupted from the moment they were saved, or something that happened some time ago), then you should also be able to retrive un-corrupted versions from before whenever the corruption occurred.
One thing is for sure, there’s something drastically wrong with your setup, and I would be immediately making copies of anything even remotely important on a flash drive or something, and confirming that you can open the copies from it so you know they’re not corrupt. It sounds suspiciously like major filesystem damage, but usually you’d notice that in other ways first.
Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately it looks like whatever happened happened more than a month ago. Anyway, I did move everything over to an external hard drive and immediately made a new backup. Now that my new hard drive has arrived I’ve transferred everything over, and I’m maintaining an archive of files as they are now as well as a local backup and a dropbox backup.
Looks like you haven’t been able to put up and respond to our comments lately, I’m guessing that it’s dealing with the virus sabotage thing, hang in there Jake.
On another note, I haven’t been up to date on things like your books, I would normally assume that a book of something like a webcomic is a compilation of a huge chuck of the updates of said comic, so I guess that I’m alittle confused about why you have to redraw them all, is it all exclusive story? But then the rest of your descriptions suggests that they are from updates and include an exclusive story.
As you saw in another post its actually been because of weather. I’ve just been away from my computer for days!
Yes, each book is a season of Modest Medusa, so about 100-250 pages plus some original content for the book. I haven’t lost anything thats been posted online. What I have lost are teh original files. These are valuable to me for a few reasons, but as far as printing goes they’re the high resolution files the printer needs to make a book. the files posted online are optimized for web viewing and are too low res to print.
Do you have a list of missing/corrupted comics ?
Would it help if someone dug them from their downloads ?
I don’t yet. I do appreciate the offer, but what I need is the original high resolution photoshop files. The lower resolution files I post online (and which some readers might have downloaded) aren’t suitable for printing.
Jake, whatever that is, the Copying process should be done on a different, 100% rliable computer.
So you have your hard drive from your main PC to a friend you you trust not to have any viruses, also give him the one for backups, and he does the backup and recovery. It will be much better if this friend works in a company that does data recovery profeccionally, as it’s a very serious thing, not for amateurs.
Al and all — it sounds that you’ve messed it up already, so i wouldn’t have my hopes up too high, but… at least you should try. Before continuing to use your computer any longer. Don’t turn it on, seriously.
I’ve absolutely been there with loosing lots of files to bad file management or weird computer glitches I’m not tech savvy enough to decipher. Hopefully you didn’t loose too much work!
We’ll see. I won’t be able to do a full inventory for awhile.
I had a similar problem with an SSD that was quietly failing. Some files would even open but were impossible to copy because of CRC failures. Check the SMART stats on the drive for uncorrectable failures and sector reallocation.
If you want to completely avoid this in future (assuming you find something), you really need a disk array with parity checking. Snapraid is free and you can add in stablebit (paid) on top for automatic drive failure prediction, drive pooling and online redundancy.
Jesus, I wish I understood anything you just said. I’ll need to figure it out I guess.