For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for November 17, 2024

That really sucks ! ! !

Aren’t there ways to recover lost computer info??

If Mike’s assignment is in Peru, maybe Gunther’s ex, Rosa, can send it back to him, LOL.

You have to keep saving it every step of the way. That way you won’t lose it all.

ALWAYS make backups regularly. He should have saved after every page if not every paragraph. I learned the hard way as he just did. I lost MANY irreplaceable files forever over the years including programs I wrote and 3D models I created. It can really hurt sometimes.

Windows 95 was already in beta testing

Making and saving copies is sometimes helpful in these circs. Just today I resurrected a copy of a Very Important file that I had somehow, somewhen caused to vanish. Very relieved!

He did 11 pages without saving along the way? Not very bright. Shouldn’t be in college.

I love the view graph projector in the last panel. That brings back memories. Another now-archaic technology that’s been supplanted by the computer (PowerPoint), though you still need a projector, a much-more-expensive one, to show it in a group setting like a classroom.

Try control Z

Years ago I worked for a company where some of the people I supported worked in another state. One time one of my people called me & asked if there was a way to recover a document after a computer crash. I told him it was easy as long as he remembered to save it. Guess who didn’t save it…at all! Nine pages…completely gone. He learned to save frequently after that.

Sigh… This is what happen when you try to do your project on a obsolete computer!

Coworker was writing a program nearby and I was having trouble with my computer and saw the powerstrip light was not on. I turned it off!!! The light didn’t work. I heard a bad phrase from the coworker as I shut off his power. Luckily, he had printed out his code up to that point. I retyped it in for him as he couldn’t touch type and I could. In the old days when saving you would get “save, retry or abort” or some weird thing like that. If you goofed on the keystroke, you lost the file. Then there was saving to 5 1/4" disks which would die from mishandling. I used to keep 3 copies to be safe.

First rule of computers: Save early and often. Also, know the location of where you are saving.

According to Mike, he did save it, so the problem may be that he didn’t realize where he was saving it. When I work on a research project, I often open a lot of different files which have been saved in different folders. When you create a new document, the last folder opened before you save it will be its ‘default’ folder unless you specifically designate a different one.

Years ago, my organization purchased a huge, fancy backup system to automatically back up everything. We worker bees still backed up our work but everything that was important for headquarters [e.g., final reports, presentations, meetings, admin, personnel files, etc.] was all backed up by the system. A few years went by and Headquarters needed to retrieve some information from the backup. Oops! The backup system had been backing everything up in one massive file which couldn’t be downloaded or opened because it was too large. And we didn’t have a backup for our backup.

I worked tech support for a large, international company in the late ’90’s. They mandated that all work would be done on a network server (which today is called the cloud). All programs were configured to auto save. If the computer crashed, they just swapped out the hard drive with pre-imaged drives – took a couple of minutes to configure the drive to the computer. User logged in and was up and running in about 10 minutes with minimal data loss. They estimated a savings of approximately $1M per year from no more lost man hours and productivity.

Been there, done that. Failed to name the document and failed to notice what wrong folder it went into.

If you got a manual with your computer, Mike, I want to see it !!!

Relax, Mike. It’s all there in the “bit bucket”.

Mike’s excuse has a familiar ring to it.

And this was a long time ago – Pre-Data Files Recovery apps…

I wonder when the strip was written. Lost documents are pretty easy to find today. I either transfer every single document I’ve worked on during the day to the thumb drive or work on the drive itself. Everything I’ve written (books, research, etc.) are saved in three locations.

This was about 40-45 years ago when I was using a commercial (ie not free) program and it completely screwed up the hard drive. I lost everything since the only way to make the computer usable again was to reformat the hard drive. I was not yet in the habit of making “offline” copies to an external drive. I got a Zip drive not long after and started using that to back up data. (Anybody remember Zip drives?)

Ah! Memories! Those were the days! As I get older I’ve realized there are fewer and fewer people around who were adults before PCs and the internet were invented.

Auto Save, Auto Save, Auto Save

This brought back a few unpleasant memories of the same thing happening to me, but it was always the computer choosing to just totally lock up and require a reboot by holding the power button. My total anguish and self-loathing at the realization that I hadn’t saved the document even once, and it was totally gone.

I never really gave it much thought but the auto save feature built into Office365 means most people today will never have the opportunity to experience that particular mix of emotions. At least not from losing a document on their computer…

Save early, save often. Autosave doesn’t always work the way you want it to.

I learned decades ago that when a computer saves a file and it “disappears,” it’s usually because you hit “Save” without checking the directory it was about to be saved to and then not finding it there when you look for it.

Redoing the save steps (if you haven’t already exited the program) usually shows you where it was really saved.

When I was in high school, I was staying up late working on a paper. I had almost finished when the computer completely died and wouldn’t reboot. Luckily, I had the first 3 pages printed out. My mom still had an old typewriter and she typed the first three pages while I hand-wrote the last two from memory and she typed them up as well.

Professor Kingsfield does not look amused.

“BURRRRRRRRRP!!!!!!!”

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.

They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several hours, lines of code streaming up the screen.Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out.”“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is astonished.He stutters, “But how?! I lost everything yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”God chuckles, “Only Jesus saves.”

You can recover stuff now if it’s in the cloud, 30 years ago not as easily. We’ve been using PC’s for 44 years and you still can’t convince a lot of people to back up their data. Technology can’t cure human nature !

This is why you back your work up, early and often.

I don’t remember those old computers very well, but I’m struggling to think what he could have done that would have completely obliterated the file that quickly.

At the time, this was actually SUPER relevant and kind of became an iconic strip for how much it happened. I had a lot of work erased by faulty machines at the university.

Back in the day this was a lot more common. Remember the Blue Screen of Death?

I’ve learned the hard way that important written work should be saved in several formats – text, pdf, and printed. One of the big values in saving as text – printed or plain text – is the ease of looking in multiple generations for past (but not always discarded) perspectives.

he probably also lost his collection of p0rn downloaded from usenet newsgroups