My Paper Disappeared!

[wlsn]

Hi

 

So I had just finished my finishing touches on my sermon preparation this Saturday night.  I had written down and arranged everything on the "Paper".  Right when I was trying to synchronise that Paper to the iPad for preaching via dropbox, the strangest thing happened.  My paper did not synocronize and I still had an old version of the paper on my iPad.  I tried a few more times to hit syncronize via dropbox and it did not work.  Then I tried sync with mobile device and the same thing happened (it did not sync to the current version of the paper I had on the mac).  Accordance then crashed and after I restarted it, the Mac had lost the paper!  It was not even there at all!  I went into the accordance files and navigated to the paper.  I opened it and it was the same old version that was on the iPad.  All my edits for that evening were gone!

 

I however, had the sermon pretty well assimilated and could re-work it again.  My concern is what if this happened just before I got up to preach?  It could have been worse.  Is this something that anyone is aware of?  Did I do something wrong?

[Solly]

I feel your pain! I also have experienced glitches with dropbox backup/synchronization to the point that I do not trust it totally. Anything I do that is nontrivial gets ported to other file formats and directory locations. With an Accordance paper that I value, I save the paper as Plain Text (readable by any text tool), RTF (readable by most word processors), and DocX (readable by the new tools). Since the place these files are saved is totally under your control, you may place them in an organized file structure that makes backup easy. Oh, backup of really important stuff goes to separate backup devices (often more than one) on site and one or more off-site locations (such as cloud storage or bank vault lock box). 

 

Ok, I am paranoid, but I have been bitten too many times over the years. When computer tech entered the classroom late in my second decade of teaching, I always had transparencies of the important screens in case the system went down. I also had at least two spare bulbs for the overhead projector in case a bulb went out (and at times it would be two in a row). I also made sure I had a real slate blackboard with multiple packs of chalk (chalk breaks), and even a small step stool to help reach the top of the board in case I had bursitis again and could not reach upwards. When we moved to the new building with only whiteboards, I often failed to find a marker that worked in the shared classrooms, so I carried my own sets with me in my brief case.

 

It is really good not to trust things to work as expected and to have a backup plan. I hope you may find humor in my extreme cautions and be motivated to take an extra step for that just in case event.

 

Hoping you never experience tech glitches again,

Joseph