I just lost 15 hours worth of work, ask me anything.

[saline]

So there I was in the home stretch of my programming assignment. My compiler froze for maybe thirty seconds, crashed and my whole 1,500 line program was gone, totally, completely and utterly gone.

If this isn't a sign that I'm supposed to just do political science I don't what is.

sign... back to work from left over scraps I happend to have printed.

[sasquatch]

1. Do you have all of your firearms locked up?

;) Don't worry it's just work.

[Old and In the Way]

2. Autosave is a damn handy tool......any add-ins for your compiler?

[saline]

3. not an issue of saving.

I saved all the time, every time you compile it auto saves. This just crashed up while I was typing. I was accessing a member of a structure I'm using and Micro$oft's compiler pops open a window of the structures properties and methods, for some reason this always slows the computer for a moment and this time it just crashed. I think this is the straw and linux here I come as soon as this class is over.

[Journeyman]

4. I don't know about compilers. . .

but when I'm doing graphics, I save whenever I change from one function to another, or whenever I get a a tinge of worry or doubt. I also save my work under progressive file names, updating as needed to minimize any potential loss. At worst, even if an entire file is irretrievably lost, the most I'll ever lose is a half-day's labor. I also run a raid-array hard drive coupling that mirrors itself, to provide an added measure of serenity.

Paranoid? Pragmatic? . . . I'll leave it to others to take that measure. All I do is react to past stimulus, and there's nothing like lost data and wasted days to motivate future behavior.

I wish you luck as you recover from this disaster. One of the few consolations at times like this is that recreating work is generally quicker than the initial creation.

[saline]

5. quick work

Luckily I printed a copy of my program yesterday, all 16 pages. So I'm copying that back in but I've done so much work since then. I hope it just comes back to me as I go.

[Exultant Democracy]

6. I feel for you man

that sucks so much.
Over the summer I was working on a huge (celebrity multi-million dollar) lawsuit as a legal assistant. We were getting up to one of our filing dead lines right when I was planning to stop work so that I could have 2 weeks of vacation before school.
Anyway my firm really needed someone to take care of a whole lot of stuff that came in a few days before I was going to leave and they begged me to stay on because I knew the case. So over then next week and a half I worked every day for 12-14 hours to get everything done for them. I finish and two days later they call me and tell me that the parties had come to a settlement, which meant that I killed myself for nothing.

[dani]

7. that's why I backup all my projects

that I'm working on at least once a day, sometimes every few hours if I'm working intensely on something. I once had a file get corrupted somehow during a build cycle, I learned my lesson (even though I eventually managed to recover it).

I'm sorry you lost your work, I know it's a terrible feeling.