Best Laid Plans.... #Computers #Frustration #Fortune

Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay

I had great plans for today. Having spent all week on day-job-related stuff, I’d blocked off Sunday for writing. After getting my Lisabet email, I planned to spend the rest of the day on my WIP, finishing off the current half-complete chapter and maybe, just maybe, getting a start on my next.

Then I discovered that my email client wouldn’t start and things came to a screeching halt. I really didn’t understand what Thunderbird was complaining about, but it worked yesterday. So I figured all I needed to do was restore the state of the system from last night’s back up...

THEN I found that I couldn’t decrypt the back up file. The GPG program I use was complaining that the file was too large. Okay, so it was 5 GB... and the program was choking at 4 GB. I searched the web but found no real help for this problem.

On the other hand, I didn’t realize my Lisabet files had gotten so large, either. This was a wake up call; I needed to archive some of the stuff I have laying around on my hard drive.

Meanwhile, I really needed to get my email working. I’ve been using Thunderbird for decades (literally), and I really like its functionality. It’s a core tool to help me organize my writing and marketing work. I have four different email accounts I use with the program, for different purposes, and dozens of folders, often with multiple levels of nesting. Now I needed to recreate everything.

Luckily, I had the raw email files in another backup, but setting up new accounts, then figuring where each folder needed to go in order to show up correctly... well, let’s just say I didn’t get any writing done today! I did succeed in reconstituting my email system (I think). I also set up a new drive for archiving stuff that I don’t use often, so I could clear some space on my active drive. But my poor chapter is going to have to wait for another day.

Well, at least I discovered that my backup strategy had a serious hole in it. I suppose that’s fortunate. Another time I might have lost a manuscript, rather than some email config files – something that couldn’t be replaced if it were gone.

It’s tough to stay calm in this sort of situation. Even tougher to be grateful, though I really should be, since this incident could save me from something much worse. Still, I’m disappointed not to have made much needed progress on my ever-so-slowly developing novel.

Sigh. The life of an author. It’s all glamor and fun, isn’t it? ;^)