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Aug 2020

Good luck! I know at the start of the lockdown my laptop gave me the screen of death and I literally started crying. I was already emotional unstable with what was going on that seeing my only lifeline die before my eyes...yousa. For now, take a deep breath, get it to a shop, and hope for the best. If the hard drive is good than you're very likely going to be able to save those files.

That is really unfortunate. Like a lot of people mentioned here, I also do all of my writing in Google Docs and I will also upload my completed comics to Google Drive as well. A few weeks back, I had a sudden bout of paranoia and purchased an external drive as an extra backup. By the time it arrived, my paranoia subsided and I still haven't gotten around to using it. This thread might be the inspiration I need to get to that.

Wow this is so awful and stressful. Thanks for sharing your experience and hope that you are able to recover your work!!

Oh no that's so awful! I hope all is well.

Don't get discouraged! I had a similar thing happen to my old computer, so I can understand.
Lost my files for the RPG game that I was working on. I gave up on RPG games and years later started working on them again. The only thing that I regret is not working on the games earlier. : )

But I think it's possible to take your harddrive to someone specialist and ask him if he could move some of your files on a usb or something like that, but about your work, did you save the next episodes in the laptop ? If so you maybe able to rewrite them ? Because the hard thing is if your whole work has gone before you publish it

Sorry this has happened to you... Hopefully you'll be able to recover your story somehow

Don't panic. Blue screen isn't the end of the world and it doesn't mean your data is gone. You can remove the harddrive and connect it to another computer. I'd be very surprised if your harddrive shit the bed. You'll need a SATA cable (possibly micro-SATA to SATA since it's a laptop drive) and an available SATA power connector on the computer you're connecting to. If you have a Microcenter near you, they can help get you what you need.

Lets no worry until we have to. First of all, try to get someone to look at your hard drive. Maybe some other random piece of your laptop died, and your HD still has all your stuff.
And after this insane scare, please, like PLEASE set up your data with some cloud service. External HD, memory card, etc... can break or just die with time. I have an Onedrive family plan that I share with some old college friends, and all of my comic files are safe there.

Good luck!

As others have mentioned, I would recommend that even if you use a cloud service, still have a local copy backed up somewhere because even though it's rare cloud services can and do fail. And you don't want to be one of the victims of Google or Dropbox's next big fiasco even if they do end up compensating you money or something... your manuscript is worth more than its own weight in gold :<

And yes it's likely your data is still in the harddrive! Very likely that even if harddrive is corrupted part of the data is still there! (And possibly the harddrive is totally fine.) Please try to restore it first and don't reset or wipe anything!

You've all been so nice!!

I'm not touching the laptop until a professional can get his hands on it. It's been put up, out of sight, out of mind. I'm now using google docs and purchasing an external hard drive so hopefully this won't happen to me again. :heart:

Serious condolences. This has happened to me as well, and it's extremely rough. I appreciate you making a PSA to save this misfortune from others in the future. It's a pretty good reminder for me to go and back up my work as well <<;

Hopefully you can repair it. There are definitely ways to get work off a dead laptop--I've had a blue screen quite a lot in my life. The biggest issue is if files become corrupted--but there's still a chance it's still there. But, the corruption spreads every time the computer is on if you don't know what you're doing, so once you see the sign of that corruption, take it to a computer genius asap.

It's not gone yet. Pop out your laptop's HDD, and stick it into an SATA\USB adapter, see if it will be operable. Then just dump everything of importance from it.

My backup situation is, to put it lightly, tricky. Google docs or any other cloud service won't do, since I need to store an incremental backups of all my stuff including both work and personal project, and this whole thing comes up to about one an a half TB of data. I put together a really small and really cheap mini-PC server that hosts just an OS (Ubuntu, I think) and a 4TB HDD, on which I dump all files changed since the last backup session via a program called "syncback" about once a week. So I end up with lots of folders sorted by date that nest all changes I done to any of my files. It would be a pain in the ass to recover from such an archive, but on the plus side - that half a year old file that I deleted since I thought I will never need it again but now need? It's up there. There's some files over in the google cloud and my laptop, but the server is the most complete backup I have. Though it sits just a shelf above my PC, so I'm still slightly paranoid of things like "what if there would be a fire when I'm not home?

Sorry this happened to you. It sucks when this happens, and I know how that feels. It's best to take it to a repair shop, and they should be able to get your data off your hard drive. In terms of backup, I actually keep my files on an SD card as well as a backup external hard drive.