View Single Post
stoo
Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2005-01-06, 17:16

Early morning on thesis handin day I lost 80% of my thesis.

I was making some final touches to the layout of my thesis and the text editor crashed. The editor then tries to autosave, while going down in flames. It only manages to write the first 20% of the file.
I fix it from the backups, then backup what I think is the complete thesis everywhere I can think of, including both of my computer science dept. accounts. I render the LaTeX file (it's a markup language) to Postscript and discover than the back 80% is missing. Not a nice feeling.When I finally accept that it's irrecoverable from my current position, the time is about 2:30am. All I have is a hard copy of the current draft.
However, there is a lab compter with a draft on it that I haven't overwritten. The lab opens at 8am, thesis handin is midday. A morning of typing and layout, an incident with an empty printer, a broken binding machine and a short run to the teaching office later and it's back to the way it was 12 hours ago. Handed in with 15 minutes to go, went home and slept for four hours, in clothes I'd been wearing for 30.

Moral of the story: backup several versions. (Ironically, I had a CVS respository to do this for the project's code, but didn't include any of the actual thesis writeup in it).

Quote:
Oh absolutely. I have my entire research in CVS, from code to LaTeX files to PDFs of papers I reference.

Last edited by stoo : 2005-01-06 at 17:22.
  quote