The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Page 10
At long last, a new page of The Doom That Came to Sarnath! As usual I’ve been tinkering with this page a bit in Photoshop, but I think it’s ready to show.
I’m really sorry that this page has taken so long to post. No, seriously, I’m REALLY sorry: the truth is, I was in the middle of uploading this page two weeks ago, on August 17, when my computer suffered a massive and fatal crash and I lost all the data from the scan. I took my computer to the Mac store and later to a useless data recovery service, only to discover that the hard drive was totally unsalvageable and I had lost several months’ worth of data. This was, of course, totally my own fault for not keeping proper backups, due to problems with my Time Machine drive that I had shelved in the “take care of sometime later” category. In the end, I had to restore all my data from an old backup, in the process losing all my scans of The Doom That Came to Sarnath (although I still have the original artwork), my assorted Lovecraftian sketches from 2012, and the biggest loss of all, my color Map of the Dreamlands. The only copies of the map that still exist in any format are the physical ones I printed up, so when they’re gone, they’re gone! Although it was bad, I have to admit it could have been much worse; I still have all of the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath interior artwork & comic pages, for instance. And I can rescan & re-polish Sarnath. I’ve never lost data from a crash before, so if this is what it takes to make me set up a system of redundant data backups, that’s just the way it is. In fact, the whole thing has given me an idea for a new project (no, it’s not a story about computer crashes), which hopefully will be finished before too long.
Anyway, enough whinin’! I’m back with a working computer after two weeks without one, and I’m ready to resume Sarnath as well as a couple of new projects! In the meantime, I’ll give you a one-word hint as to my next Lovecraft comic adaptation: mew.
Great to see Sarnath resumed! Also, it’s been helpful that your Twitter feed has kept ticking over, as there could have been concerns a more physical “crash” was responsible for the long hold.
Difficult not to get quite paranoid about backups after a major computer crash, I know. I still have boxes of backup floppy disks, despite no longer having a computer capable of reading them…
Here’s to calmer waters for the rest of Sarnath (did I give away the ending?).
This page is really beautiful, Jason. And, uh, the placement of those scissors in the last panel made me wince, if you know what I mean. Was that deliberate?
My computer has been slowly degrading as well. There was a period of a few weeks not long ago when it would refuse to read the hard-drive, and I thought I was done for. I ended up taking out one of my RAM modules and it seemed to make it more stable, so I wasted no time in installing Areca (a free backup program) and backing everything up.
Mew!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D I’ve been waiting for that story
On second thought, I’m going to rescind my recommendation of Areca for backups and recommend FastCopy instead. Areca has a lot of features, but doing an incremental backup (that is, just the new files since the last backup) seems almost as slow as doing the original one. FastCopy, on the other hand, though having fewer features, is also very fast and can do an incremental backup in just seconds.
Thanks for all the backup advice, everyone! I still haven’t invested in a cloud update system, two weeks after the recovery, and you’ve reminded me — I’VE REALLY GOT TO!
@Esn — Actually, the placement of the scissors was totally unintentional! -_-;; Please blame artistic sloppiness rather than Freudian slippage! I think I may have to fix that….
Hey, it doesn’t necessarily have to be fixed! It’s not super-obvious and it’s kind of funny, actually. It’s the sort of thing that will be popular with little brothers. :) What makes it even better is the serene, content expression on the plant-man’s face.
I do reiterate my recommendation of FastCopy for backup – free, simple, fast, does all I need. It also supports long filenames, unlike some others. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now on a computer that’s about to give out any second (actually, I’m going to set up the new one today or tomorrow), doing incremental backups every day just in case it’s the last time it ever turns on. I bought a 1.5TB external flash drive and created several folders on it (“C-drive”, “D-drive”, etc.), then I just created several “jobs” in FastCopy.
I’m not sure about cloud storage – I guess the experience of the MegaUpload shutdown and all the people who lost their data has just made me a bit wary about the whole idea of trusting other companies to store your data.