I'm having a meltdown please help!

Jonny L

Jonny L

Jonny L

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So guys, I'm having a major panic, its the final deadline for my masters dissertation today and I've come in early to the library to check it, print it off and bind it before work.

Anyway, cut to now. The file is saved on skydrive which is saying its corrupt! I have downloaded said file and still no luck. At the minute I've got a friend who is an IT professional looking at it.

But if this is unsuccessful is there anything else I can do?

Thank you for any help!
 
I am so surprised people only carry 1 copy of these things. Have people not learnt not to do this yet? Saying that when I worked on the helpdesk at a college I had a student come up to me in tears as she kept all of her work on a SINGLE USB pen and by all of her work I mean the 3 years of her degree and the year she had done of her masters.... and she smashed the pen. I was literally shocked when I asked her if she had another copy and she told me no.
 
Woogie said:
I am so surprised people only carry 1 copy of these things. Have people not learnt not to do this yet? Saying that when I worked on the helpdesk at a college I had a student come up to me in tears as she kept all of her work on a SINGLE USB pen and by all of her work I mean the 3 years of her degree and the year she had done of her masters.... and she smashed the pen. I was literally shocked when I asked her if she had another copy and she told me no.
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That actually makes me feel ill. I have/had probably 4 electronic copies of all my assignments/projects ever. It's far, far too easy to lose one copy if it's the only copy you have.

Good luck Jonny L.
 
I hope for your sake you have a copy.

Anything important that is kept digitally NEEDS a backup.

Once you, hopefully, retrieve the work I would suggest maybe using a software such as Fbackup to create automatic backups.

If you are interested in one solution, I do the following... I have my work stored on my main PC HDD, which is automatically backed up to dropbox. It is also backed up on a hourly basis to another HDD in my pc, and then an external USB when I choose to manually.
 
horseunderwater said:
Talk to your tutor explain to the university what has happend they night give you time to sort this out
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In my experience a university will do nothing to help in this case. They would just ask why I was waiting 'till hand in day to print it off/check it and why I didn't have a back up copy somewhere.
 
First thing we were told every year at college/uni always keep a backup, to the point they actually provided USB drives to everyone during the initial week of term!

Shouldn't it be printed and bound already?
 
Dependant on the format, you can recover the bare ASCII from most files.
I'm pretty sure there are a few recovery programs around that do this.

I take it your dissertation isn't anything to do with Science or Technology?
 
Two copies surely? The origional must be on your PC so go home and get it and stop wasting time online!

I also can't believe your printing a masters dissertation on submission day surely it needs to be bound etc which leaves you hardly eny time to get this sorted? I'm staggered people leave undergrad disertation until the final day but you would have thought someone studying a higher qualification would know better....
 
Word makes temp backups normally so you should be able to find a copy of it!

Although when I did my dissertation I had it backed up on a pen drive, 3 hard drives and my web host just in case!

Jcb33.
 
I had about 20 backups by the time I had finished my masters dissertation. My undergrad I had it stored in 4+ different places. I could never take the risk.
 
If it is a Word document you may be able to open it in a text editor and get the text out of it, however that's probably not going to help with images, footnotes, references and so on.

I'm surprised somebody doing a Masters hasn't grasped the need for robust data backups. Seriously.

Hope you can get it sorted, other wise the price of the lesson of not backing up would be disproportionally high.
 
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