Author Topic: Laptop died! During the tournament...  (Read 2380 times)

cobi

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Laptop died! During the tournament...
« on: December 15, 2008, 10:10:34 AM »
So, right as heads up started my laptop completely died.  Powered off and wouldn't turn back on.  This was the first time that I wasn't tracking everything on paper as backup.  Thankfully it was only a 12 person tournament, and I already had the prizes counted out etc.... so we were able to rebuild everything on paper from memory.  Also, thank god I kept our tournament/season results in a spreadsheet on my home PC.  I'd have been up a creek without that info.

Hopefully I can get it working again or at least pull the hard drive out and recover my tournament files.  I'd hate to start over. 

I'm assuming that even if I had auto-save enabled (which I'm not sure I did), it probably didn't save the tourney data for this one?

Lessons learned: 
Keep a hard copy during the tournament.
Keep a backup timer of some sort with you (I had one)
Backup your tournament files to another PC, or external device.  As an IT guy, I know better but didn't do it.

tandemrx

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Re: Laptop died! During the tournament...
« Reply #1 on: December 16, 2008, 10:34:57 AM »
If you had auto-save on and can get back into the hard drive I would think you would be in good shape.

If you didn't have auto-save on, then you might be out of luck with that tourney.

Good luck.  I have gotten pretty good at making sure autosave is on as I had an issue in a test tourney once and learned my lesson early.

I have my autosave set at 5 minutes, but now that I think of it, I have a newer laptop so I think I will set it for more frequently and also have the auto save for events checked so that it picks up when people are knocked out and such - my old laptop was so slow that the autosave slowed the clock display refresh, so I set an infrequent backup.


cobi

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Re: Laptop died! During the tournament...
« Reply #2 on: December 19, 2008, 11:24:27 AM »
Well, I was able to recover my files, but I didn't have auto-save enabled so no dice for the current tournament, but at least I got my templates and all my old ones.  No big deal really.

If you ever need to recover data from a hard drive, these are pretty handy to have around.  I'd been wanting to get one for a while but never got around to it.  This gave me a good excuse.  Took about 5 minutes to get all my stuff back.

http://www.cooldrives.com/saandidehadr1.html

Easier than having to put it into another computer.