question about buying tutorials
 

A while back I bought two and a few weeks later my computer's hard drive crashed. Does this mean they are lost forever? How do I keep from losing tutorials next time?

Forgive me, I'm not computer savvy. I did manage to buy a memory flash drive. Do I store it in that?

Yes, that is the first thing you want to do when you buy a tutorial after saving a copy to your computer, is to copy it onto your jump drive (if that is the same thing as a memory flash drive). Then, you never have to worry about getting another copy of your tutorial from the one who wrote it. I believe they will send you another pdf download if you ask them to.

That's what I do.

Most of the time, tutorials are sent as PDF attachments in an email. Are the emails still saved in your email account? If so, you can just open them up and re-save a copy of the file to your PC.

If you contact the seller(s), they will likely have a record of your purchase if it was recent enough, and most would happily re-send you the file I'd imagine.

Hope it works out!

I save all my tuts in my hotmail account. I had a crash in November and only lost a few that I had downloaded as opposed to having them emailed to me.

Wow... it didn't really hit me that I could have lost all of my tutorials! I also save them in a special file in my email account so I'm safe (more out of laziness than forethought). Whew! Though, I don't think I would have had that moment of total panic if I hadn't seen this thread because my computer did die a few weeks back! :D

I thought I saved them in my AOL email account, but I can't find them there. Thanks for the info!

Lisa, I don't think any of the ones you lost were from me, but if they were just tell me and I'll resend them. No problemo.

And yeah- I save everything important to me on usb flash drives, IN my email account AND I upload them to my website server. LOL It would have to be some sort of nuclear event for me to lose my files and by then I'd have bigger problems. LOL

~~Mary

I save them to my laptop and then to an external hard drive.

or burn them to disc :)

I'm a computer geek from way back, and my file storage rule has always been: If I need the file, I save it in 2 places, and if it's really important, I save it in 3 places.

Had all of my tutorials on my laptop hard drive, on an external hard drive, and on a jump drive. Now, guess what happened?!?!?

Yep - within one week, my laptop crashed, external hard drive failed, and hubby borrowed my jump drive and accidentally erased everything. Of course, I had saved files everywhere except onto a CD/DVD.

Luckily, some of the tutorials were in my GMail account, and I've emailed the writers of the rest with copies of the etsy or eBay invoices and they have all been kind enough to send them to me again. Many thanks to all of you who have sent me replacement files!!

Now I'll be burning everything onto disks. hmmm...where can I store the disks so I won't lose them, DH won't think they are old junk and throw them away, dogs or parrots won't chew on them, etc...???

Birdy

Well I screwed up 2 times I had them saved to my email file and I guess with MSN it is saved to your hard drive not there server. It sucks about a year ago I lost my hard drive to my desk top. This time I thought I had done a back up to qwests data save file and it did not go though. I am starting over contacting the people that sent them so I can get them again for the 2nd time. I feel like such a ass but everyone was so nice to resend them. So just email them I am sure no one will have a issue. This time I will for sure put them on my flash drive right away, be sure I send them to the qwest back up and burn a CD. SO this will never happen to me again

I saved all my tutorials in a pc, a laptop and USB drive :P and I printed every single one of them so I can read them at work.

Great info thank you

Yes, same for my tutorials! I send a link for download in an email, along with “save this email as proof of purchase” instructions. If the customer doesn’t have a copy of that email, I can usually still find it in my records, but it’s WAY easier if I have the original email to reference. If you buy a tut, my suggestion is to retain a hard copy of the confirmation email and/or PayPal transaction, along with all the mentioned backup/printout/cloud backup/duplicate backup/etc. A few years ago I lost an external hard drive and quite a few tutorials I had purchased as well as free ones I found online. The problem was, I didn’t have a list of what had been on the backup drive, so most of it was just gone! Lesson learned!

Good info.....

I like to save them online somewhere (gmail draft for example), as well as on external hard drive and thumb drive. DH and I have had a box.com account for several years ($10/mo). We used to use it mostly for business, but now we save important info there, and often also password protect although it is pretty secure. I’m pretty sure that my copies of SLT and tutorials take up at least 80% of our collection. No regrets.