I spent a huge part of the weekend inputting my 2012 dragonfly swarm locality data into Google Earth, carefully saving my work after each page of data entered. Google Earth froze shortly after my last save… When I restarted it, somehow I’d lost every bit of work I did this weekend, and all of last year’s data too. This is what I have to say to that:
AAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
(Imagine a LONG string of expletives after that scream there too, as in several minutes worth of bad words strung together into one monster run-on sentence, for the full effect.)
Thanks to my many redundant backups, I have the mapped localities from last year saved in multiple other locations. Still, 14 hours of my weekend were completely wasted and I’m going to have to start over on the 2012 data!!! I’m so angry and upset… On the bright side, this has convinced me that I need to change the mapping for my project, something I’ve meant to look into for over a year now. It is finally time to make that a priority!
Needless to say, the 2012 swarm maps won’t make it online today. Sorry about that. I hope I can get the maps up next week. In the meantime, I enjoy the posts I have planned for this week! They’ll be less grumbly than this one, I promise. :)
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The Dragonfly Woman 
I’ve been through same numerous times… even worse time wastes when software failed after 48 hrs of accumulated laborious work. Sorry for the loss anyway
Thanks. It’s an incredibly frustrating experience, though I’m sure all scientists go through similar things eventually. Doesn’t make it any less frustrating when it happens though…
You are amazing in the work you do.
Aw, that’s very sweet. Thanks!
So frustrating! :(
It is! SO frustrating! It ended up being such a waste of a weekend. Sigh…
PLease let us know what mapping program you end up using.
Will do! It might take me some time to work it all out. I’m an absymal programmer, so it’s not a simple thing for me to do.
Oh, I’m so sorry that happened!
Thanks. I’m still really annoyed about the experience.
I am sorry to hear of this frustrating experience. Next week you will be able to laugh about it, because we either have to laugh about such things or go crazy. On the other hand, it is a good example of how well the brain works. I don’t mean the brains of computer designers. I mean the brains that have existed for who knows how long, keeping track of complex information, making decisions, reacting in appropriate ways, etc. This happens in all organisms that have a “central processing system”. Even an insect has a more reliable “system” than computers, I often think. So, somehow we must keep our perspective as we deal with these primitive machines.
Yeah, it will be fine in the long run. For now though, it’s just so annoying to have lost so much work when I was being so careful to save everything. Computers are so great in so many ways, but something like this really makes me hate them.
My sympathies!
Thanks. I appreciate it.
What a shame!! Am so sorry this happened & hope you’ll be able to recover much of your work. Enjoy your updates! Here’s to new beginnings!
Thanks. I’ve already started inputting the data again. It’s going faster this time because I learned a lot more about how to use Google Earth over the last few days, so hopefully it won’t take as long to do it all over.
omg! terrible! my head would have popped off!
I was ready to throw my computer against the wall and stomp on it until it was broken into a hundred pieces! SO frustrating. I wouldn’t have cared quite so much if I hadn’t spent so much of my weekend working on it though. I hate wasting weekend time like that!
Yes, technology is soooo wonderful and soooo frustrating. I long for the simpler life but wouldn’t give back that link to all this good info for almost anything.
Agreed! As frustrating as technology can be, I LOVE being able to access almost any information I could possibly want easily. Even just looking up something on Wikipedia is a pretty amazing thing! Totally worth the loss of a few days of data entry.
Sorry for the loss
Moral of the story – never work on weekends.
Ha ha! Perhaps that is the moral!
When someone hacked into the university website and trashed everything…ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!
Thank goodness many of us are untrusting and backup everything…even those ridiculed paper copies regained value. Deep calming breaths…(yeah like that really helps at this point)
AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH
Hope recover goes well – and you have time to develop plan B ( for you own sanity – it’s worth it!)
Oooh, man, that sucks! Hackers?? How do you even plan for something like that?! I’ve already changed my personal backup plan so that I’m backing up my files to my external hard drive every night now and I intend to keep my online backup service, but I’m hoping that this incident will convince my husband that I need a Drobo. :) I keep hard copies of all my data too, but I do want to move away from manually inputting each and every dragonfly swarm sighting every year. We’ll see how it goes! It would help if I were a better programmer…
So sorry you lost all of your data. Hope you can retrieve it again and yes, do massive backup before uploading anything.
The work I did over the weekend is gone for good, but I do have several backups of the file I started with so I don’t have to redo 2010 and 2011 too. Still, just doing this year’s data entry again is a lot of work. Stupid computer…