Painter IX Woes

[J Digory]

Oh brother. Sometimes I do something brilliant, but mostly I do something that would make Homer Simpson proud. Such is the case this evening when I spent 2 hours or so of inspired hard work on a map in Painter 9 when it suddenly decided to crash...and for some reason I hadn't saved it!
Then I have to ask myself why anyone would make a program that doesn't autosave periodically. Especially when you think about the passion artists can put into their art (and the lack of commonsense we sometimes show).

There isn't any hope in getting any of that work back is there? I'm on a mac running up to date OSX if that matters at all.
This wasn't the first time I lost something to a crash of software and it's not the worst. But it hurts none-the-less.

What's the most you've lost because you were silly and didn't save?

[Redrobes]

There have been an awful lot of people posting about crashes and data loss recently. It surprises me that people can go hours without a save. Anything more than a few minutes and I start to feel that twinge of intrepidation at each mouse move. My PC is very stable and it never crashes unless it completely dies and need some hardware fix and yet I still never ever treat pending work as safe.

Backing up is a good idea. Naturally. But its always easier to say that after the crash and burn than thinking about it before hand. But really - it is worth it.

So when making a map I don't keep saving over and over the same file, I save map1.png then map2.png then map3.png etc. My last months challenge had Inn38.lwo as a filename... this is my first line of defense.

My PC has two HDDs which are not RAID'ed but I have them so that one is a clone of the other. I have a script but really its just one line that copies everything from one HDD to the other. If you have the same filename then it overwrites but if you delete a file then its not deleted on the clone. So sure you can mangle a file then back up and the back up version will then be mangled too but I find that I usually know when its mangled so I can fetch the clean version from hdd2 and put it back on hdd1. I run this script every few days. This is the amount of time of work lost if the HDD packs in without warning.

About once a week I copy my working HDD to an external HDD. So thats how much I lose if my whole PC gets zapped and all HDDs get wiped.

Then really critical stuff gets put to DVD and stored but thats about every 6 months. Thats my last resort if the place gets burned to the ground.

So these scripts - complicated ? No not at all. Just make a batch file and put a command line in like this :-

xcopy C:\*.* E:\ /K /O /X /E /Y /D /C /R /F /H
pause

to copy all your C drive to E. Takes a while first time you run it but its a lot faster subsequently. I put these bat files in at the root of each drive I want to copy. There are better solutions out there but I doubt they are as simple. One thing I like about this way is that I can verify that its all backed up properly. Theres no database or other system in the way of my copies.

All I can say is that this works very well for me but just find something that your happy with. Pretty sure that there is a mac version of xcopy. I know that there is an open source xxcopy which has even more options. I would imagine that it exists for the mac.

[J Digory]

Well, I had the strangest thing ever happen. I would save and then go to save again in Painter, and the SAVE would cause a crash. lol Then I would open up the saved file and it was DIFFERENT than the one I had saved! Like it STARTED to save and only got to some of the layers. Talk about a heartache. lol

Painter could be so nice, but since it sucks at WORKING it's hard to call it nice.

[Redrobes]

I think my paranoia was bred from Win95 days when everyone could Vulcan neck pinch without looking at the keyboard from sheer practice. Nowadays those events are consigned to the trash and if you get consistent crashing then a) check app website for patches and new updates, b) inform app dev of crashing and try to be specific about exactly what happened and then if no avail - c) dump said app. Not worth the stress !

Try giving the Gimp a quick thrashing. You will have RobA giving you loads of scripts to help out before you know it. If he gets any better at it then he will have voice recognition wired up where it will ask what kind of map you want and in what style then it will draw it for you.

[J Digory]

I dunno. I tried Gimp, and it was pretty hard for me to work in. I can't make heads or tails of photoshop, paintshop pro, or any of those programs. I'm not amazing with Painter, but it is made from an art perspective...so I know what the different brushes will do. I guess it doesn't hurt to try Gimp again. It was years ago before I had a tablet and when I was on windows.

I really don't think this IS going to work! I Can't even get it to work with my tablet. And that Is a pain In the butt. Ifollowed the Instructions... but it's just not working right. Add that to the fact that it's completely Foreign to me... and I just don't thiik Gimp willwork for me, On the bright side, it's interestng trying to type everything out with my tablet and handwritting recognition .

[torstan]

What's the tablet and what's the version of Gimp? There are some issues with the newer Wacom graphire drivers and Gimp. It can be worked around and is great once it's set up. Definitely not worth giving up on straight away!

[J Digory]

Newest mac Gimp and wacom graphire tablet. The thing is...it's clearly not a native mac application. All the shortcuts are screwy, so it takes me extra time. I have to click on a panel to activate it before I can even do anything on the panel...so everything takes an extra click (add those clicks up and it's a lot). I still have the problem that I am an artist trying to work with a program that isn't set up like it's actually made for artists...I have no idea what anything but LAYERS does, sadly. It's not even convenient to change the brush strokes...but on top of that, I have no ides what the brush strokes are supposed to simulate. In fact, they don't seem to simulate anything. They just make lines.