Was working on a personal project of mine, nothing amazing, more or less just practicing with substance textures etc... WHEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, windows update restarts my PC. I lost my current project progress and face palmed myself with my keyboard.
Just thought I'd get that one out there...screw you Microshit.
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Good I grew up playing Sierra games and this became my mantra: "Save early, save often!"
also as others said save often and save to more than one file.
But... consider yourself lucky. I've lost two entire hard drives to power supply / motherboard failure.
Also, if you store your working files on an SSD, back that shit up somewhere else. SSD's can randomly wipe themselves on boot up. (obviously very rare, but when you use computers as much as we do, something improbable and shitty is bound to happen eventually)
Yeah, definitely this. First thing I do on almost any personal computer after I get OS/drivers up and running, check for windows updates - install, then turn off windows updates. If I feel like getting them, I'll check for them on my own.
QFT. I heard that Allegorithmic had Linux builds working internally, but they sure are taking their time releasing them to the general public.
If I remember correctly that's the time set as default for the upgrade countdown. Which means that if you are working fullscreen, you will likely not get the warning and your currently running programs will initiate their closing sequence. If you are lucky enough you might get a popup ... but it is worded so poorly that it makes you want to hit cancel, which in this case cancels the save.
And of course the behavior of the update/restart timer is to force the restart if no action is taken, as opposed to simply doing nothing. This is indeed abysmal software design, and it personally almost made me ditch Windows for good about 2 years ago.
I can't help it - I keep imagining a catastrophic scenario where some kind of surgery device ends up shutting itself down in the middle of a procedure because of this. Fun !
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555444
The reminder to restart still pops up, but it won't auto restart when the timer runs out like it does by default.
I set this up after i had my PC restart on me twice while playing Hardcore Diablo 3 characters
I now always have a wordpad file open with random text in it,
Most of the time if it wants to shut down it won't because it need to save it first xD
And press ctrl+S all the time like a maniac.
Previous Windows would allow you to ignore the update and it wouldn't bother you again.
Windows 8 will ask you to restart, you tell it no. It will remind you again in a few minutes. You say ignore, then it will restart any ways.
Terrible system.
Max has a lovely feature to do this automatically. I've clocked close to 2300 files for a single large project previous to the one below.
http://imgur.com/2vvKDYt
If it gets too memory intensive, then compress them into a .rar or .zip.
For added bonus sync dropbox or google drive with your packages or even current project folder for free backups!
Windows 8 does.
Also going against the flow here. Don't turn off auto updates. If your using an older windows version, just have it set to download, but not install automatically. You'll get notices new updates are ready to install. Turning off auto updates is just a bad idea all around from a security perspective.
Now i'm scared.
I might start using cloud storage, if the internet gets a bit better.