Thumb drive Nightmare

I haven't really put up any entries lately, but thats because so much has been going on. And I haven't had a whole lot to say. But I guess I could tell you all about my thumb drive nightmare, because it was pretty exciting.

Our most recent project in my Intermediate Computer Applications (for Artists) class was to illustrate a fairy tale together--my teacher found a fairy tale and divided it into 20 sections and each of us chose/was assigned a section to illustrate. We needed to do a good job on these, because the whole story with our illustrations would be put up in the Juvelile section of the library.

I worked very hard on my illustration. My normal tendency would have been to procrastinate a bit more (though not until the last minute! I'm not that bad!) but since I'd never really used photoshop (the program we were required to do it in) and the picture would be on display I wanted it to be my best work. So from the day I knew which part of the fairy tale I would be working on I started work on my picture.

The day before the picture was due I had some problems saving it onto my thumbdrive, which had never really given me any significant problems before. I kept getting an error message telling me that there was not enough space on the drive. I ended up deleting all old/obsolete files, e-mailing the important ones to myself, and deleting an uneeded layer of my picture before it would finally save. Doing all this took time that I would have been in my D&C class.

Fortunately, mom was visiting that day. After hearing a long tearful account of my thumbdrive woes, she took me to the computer section of the bookstore and got me a new, bigger thumb drive. Halelujah, I thought.

So the next day I moved all my files from my old thumb drive to my new one. Most of them I still had in the form of e-mail attachments, except, of course, my fairy tale illustration file, which is like ten times to big to be attached to any normal e-mail.

The next day I planned to watch the George Pratt demonstration. I went to the HFAC early and worked in the computer lab to put the finishing touches on my illustration before printing it to be hung that night. When the demonstration was going to start, I saved the file and went up to watch the demonstration, but it turned out not to be in the place I thought it was going to be. Rather than wander around, I went back to the computer lab to finish my illustration.

It wouldn't open.

It kept giving me an error message:"This file was created in a different version of photoshop and cannot be opened on this computer." A different version of photoshop? No way! I was sitting at the exact same computer I had just saved it from less than twenty minutes before!

Well, long story short, the file had become corrupted. And I had backups of all of my other, less important files, but not that one, not the one that was due in a few hours. I tried whatever I could think of to recover the file--opening it on a differend computer, in a different program, anything... nothing.

So I started over.

But I only had a couple hours, and the illustration didn't look presentable in the least. Since I had done the whole picture before and figured out the program in the process I got much further than I would have done, but even so, the illustration looked... bad.

So in class that night I told my teacher what had happened and, fortunately she was very understanding about the whole situation. She told me that I had until the next Friday to have something up.

A week. I could finish again in a week.

I won't go into all the details of how it happened, but in trying to recover my original illustration file, the one that I had started new with ended up getting ruined. So I had to start over again over again.

And I swear the new thumb drive mom got me hates Mac programs, because it ruined my Indesign File, as well as both Photoshop ones. So I have another thumbdrive, and I'm saving all my files on BOTH, as well as e-mailing them when possible, to prevent another nightmare like this from happening.

So yesterday I finally got the illustration up with the others. And it looks.... not very good. Especially when I compare it to the piece that I was actually able to put the time into. But I did learn my lesson with this.... NEVER TRUST YOUR THUMB DRIVE.