Page 290 - December 7, 2012

Oooh, overlapping panels, haven't used that trick much. Maybe I should start experimenting with some interlocking/overlapping panel compositions, I've been feeling a bit stuck with my panel layouts for a while now. It's almost always 5-6 panels with one of them being a master panel on top of which the rest are stacked in neat rows. :/

So, this turned out to be a four-day weekend, so I'll be churning out 1,5 pages for a few days, building up my buffer even further. Yes! But boo: my flash drive decided to completely flip out on me yesterday evening, and I got a couple of scanned linearts on it which I had finished in school last week. No idea what happened, the drive was working just fine the day before and I kept it plugged in over the night, so there's not even an "incorrect removal"-thing to blame. But for some reason Windows decided the drive was corrupted and needed to be reformatted before it could be opened. HNNGHRRN What?! Why? And NOoO!!

Of course I didn't allow Windows to reformat the drive and ran a file recovery program on it to see if I could salvage anything . The program I used actually worked pretty well: I was able to pull out a whole bunch of images really easily, but oh dear: the two linearts were part of the files that were completely messed up with no way to open them. And a whole bunch of the files that I was able to open were seriously damaged. Just look at this watercolor splatter image I made for a thing in school:

Yeah, unusable. Kind of cool though, makes me wonder what the heck went on inside that drive to result in such an effect. Well, this unfortunate situation really isn't a big issue, I only use the drive to transport the occasional file between home and school, all the files have copies on at least one of the computers, in many cases two. I'll get the linearts on Monday so I'll just have to continue drawing new pages with a little gap in my production routine.

As a final note, the retrieval program I used is called "icare recovery" (no affiliation with Apple as far as I know ) and it really worked like a charm. I definitely recommend it to anyone running into similar issues. It was really easy to browse through the corrupted/unformatted drive and pick out the files that were still usable, and about 70% of the images I got out were actually perfectly fine. The program's got a free trial for up to 10 files while the full program costs like 40 bucks, and there's probably usable freeware out there if one cares to look further. It is the internet after all, there's a free alternative for most stuff. Anyways, if you run into a situation where your flash drive/memory stick/whatever dies on you and you would like to try saving some files, don't allow it to be reformatted. There's still some hope and a bunch of inexpensive things to try when one doesn't have to dough to pay hundreds of bucks for a professional to take a look at the drive.