Okay my laptop is in for warranty service and my desktop is currently down. So in a fit of cosmic irony a friend loaned me a Mac that dual boots to the windows 7 64 beta. It has NTFS-3G installed so it can write to NTFS partitions. I know the driver is working because I save some stuff to NTFS off the internet.
I just spent the last 3 hours writing a paper. I gave up sleep I may be too busy to get back to tomorrow to write this paper, I poured myself into this paper. I researched and carefully thought about every word of this paper. Did I mention it’s due tuesday and I’m going to be super busy tomorrow? I save periodically, but not periodically enough I guess.
My 3g internet thing only has 32 bit drivers so I have to do my web research as I write the paper in OSX. I use some program called TextEdit which tells me it’s saving just fine.
Well I get the text of the paper done and just need to format it. So I click save as and pick the NTFS partition, and change it from richtext to html because I wanted to see what kind of tags it would add to unformated text. I hit okay and the save box closes and it doesn’t say a word. I take this lack of error to mean it successfully saved. Naive trusting soul that I am.
Reboot to windows to finalize it in Word. Which I only have for windows. Bloody file isn’t there.
Apparently it didn’t save and it didn’t tell me it didn’t save. WTF? I tried file search but all that finds is the half finished version on the mac partition.
I suppose I should have saved more but it’s pretty damn pissy to make your word processor not tell you when it fails.
I gotta go to bed. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.
While I have sympathy for lost work 'n all, NTFS-3G is nothing to do with Apple, and neither is Windows 7. If there’s a hard and fast rule of safe computing, it’s “don’t use beta software for critical work,” and while NTFS-3G certainly claims to be safe for read/write to NTFS partitions, I’ve got to say it’s not something I’d entrust critical work to. I never attempt to write to NTFS from Linux, for example; just thinking about it gives me the willies, and that’s not even taking into account the fact that NTFS-3G doesn’t support Windows 7.
Did you only ever save to the NTFS partition? If not, then won’t there be a version on the Mac partition? My best suggestion (and I’m not a Mac user) is to reboot into OSX and see if you can find the temporary files that are surely there. You make it sound as if you saved on the Mac partition regularly, and only saved to the NTFS one at the end. In this case, it has to be recoverable.
Anyway, good luck, but leave Steve’s nuts untouched; he isn’t the one that ballsed up, I’m afraid.
Maybe so. But then, she didn’t lose a paper that she would describe thus: “I just spent the last 3 hours writing a paper. I gave up sleep I may be too busy to get back to tomorrow to write this paper, I poured myself into this paper. I researched and carefully thought about every word of this paper. Did I mention it’s due tuesday and I’m going to be super busy tomorrow?”
Yep, 1800’s here. Getting wind of that computer thingie, you know, but gosh darn it’s hard.
I fancy myself a writer. Others may disagree, I do not care. One thing I will never, ever do is rely on a computer for a first draft of anything. I write out my theses, poems, stories, recipes etc. on paper. The day pen and paper is outlawed is the day I start killin’.
Number one question from those who live in the 21st century was:
What the fuck is a first draft?
I don’t even take notes with a pen anymore. I can’t write as fast as I can type, and if I take notes with my laptop they’re a lot easier to turn into documents, which get edited as they’re written and then are really easy to revise.
The idea of expending effort to write anything longer than a grocery list by hand is kind of absurd to me.
Course I always thought the cardinal rule of using computers was to make frequent backups.
Seriously? It’s what you write first and may make changes later.
I understand that to some people a computer is their life’s blood, but to me it’s just a way to communicate with people outside my circle and post dumb shit on message boards. Pen and paper still rule with me.
Sorry to hear about the problem you had. I don’t know if Steve Jobs is really to blame, here - sounds like Word was the issue for some reason.
Is NTFS-3G any good? I’m familiar with NTFS for Mac but not this one, and as I work for a company that does cross-platform software for the other direction (HFS on PC) a lot of people ask me about how to do what you’re doing. Free software would be appealing to recommend, too.
For what it’s worth, I notice that the NTFS-3G does not explicitly say that it supports disks created with Windows 7. Not sure if this should be a concern or not; my gut instinct is that Windows 7 likely doesn’t do anything much differently than Vista, but I could be wrong.
Save early, save often, back up onto multiple sources.
Abby, I’d like to say I understand your position, but… not so much. I can understand how typing from hardcopy forces you to rewrite the entire document, and so on, but I don’t think there’s any great superiority in it.
NTFS-3G, in the great majority of cases, is just fine. Hell, it’s close to perfect. I’d have to examine the computer to see why it failed in this case, but yeah, it’s the final reverse engineered spec. I’d consider it as trustworthy as the built in Windows driver. But… computing happens, you know?
Please don’t feed Steve’s balls to a dog. The dog might get the idea that it’s OK to eat human testicles whenever they are available. A lot of dogs are between waist- and knee-high to the average guy. I’m just saying.
Yeah, I’m sorry, but you need to focus your pitting on yourself. If it’s that important, you need to save a lot, multiple copies. You did acknowledge this, but it’s a minor point in a major rant when the person at fault is you.
