|
|
Joined: 5/10/2011
Posts: 88
|
Hi All! Those who follow me on Twitter will know that last night, after four hours of working on my #1week1novel project, I had the serious misfortune of not saving my work.
My initial reaction - disbelief. I always save my work. I literally pressed the save button three times before I closed Word. But alas...
Then came the frantic searching... I used every possible tag in the "full computer search, including hidden files & what not" to find it... it was not found...
Then I cried a little. I'm not ashamed of this. I cried.
Now, the morning after what feels like a complete tragedy, I realize that I wasn't particularly attached to the work I'd done... Yeah, it was 4 hours of work, but it wasn't GOOD... It was just me trying to get thoughts on page. I'm looking forward to working on it again tonight, only making it GOOD instead of just so so....
So I was wondering how you out there in Book Country deal with a loss like this? Does it make you want to give up on the project altogether (that's essentially what I wanted to do when I went to bed last night!) Or does it make you feel like you can reproduce it, only better?
Also, if you have any tips on how to remember what you wrote, I'm all ears!
|
|
Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 608
|
Lisa,
I feel your pain! You’re not alone.
Some years back I upgraded my computer hardware. Long story short: though I thought I’d made secure copies of everything I had on my system before allowing the techs to re-format my hard drive, I didn’t. One of the short stories I lost was a 30-pager I’d labored long and hard on for the better part of six months.
No problem, I thought to myself: I’ll simply work off of the existing manuscript copy I’ve printed out and finish the story. (That’s my insurance in case of hardware failure: hard copy.) Second devastating discovery: I’d misplaced some 20+ pages of the manuscript. All I had left were the opening three pages of my agonized-over short story.
Consternation, rage, despair. O, the drama! O, the pain! And the sickening, whirling vertigo and stomach-clenching nausea—when I contemplated the enormity of my loss I felt like I was free-falling down an open elevator shaft.
Okay, I said to myself. Deep breaths. Get a grip. This isn’t as bad as what happened to Hemingway, whose first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, thoughtfully packed up all of his early fiction writing—including originals and carbons—into a suitcase that she promptly lost after leaving the bulging valise unattended for a moment on a train station platform in the Gare de Lyon when she wandered off in search of water; or Robert Louis Stevenson, who reportedly flung the first version of his “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” into a roaring fireplace after his wife criticized the manuscript. No indeed, nowhere near as bad as all that. You’ll simply have to begin anew, I told myself, using everything you learned about craft in the first attempt to write the story. And this time, I vowed—by the gods!—if I was going to labor again long and hard on the story, I would make it BETTER.
So I did.
I finished the story. ("Samhain Eve: A Celtic Tale.") And as luck (and the gods of farcical circumstance) would have it, three weeks after doing so I found my original misplaced manuscript.
I compared the two versions. I think you can guess where I’m going with this anecdote. In every way—diction, pacing, cadence, narrative description and character dialogue, the newer version of the story was superior to what I had originally written. Only—that newer, better version would never had existed had I not been forced to do a completely new draft.
I think, Lisa, when fate and cruel circumstance destroys or otherwise erases our writing from this space/time continuum it’s simply the universe saying: Try again. You can do better.
Leastwise, I choose to believe that!
I am sure—given your passion for this "lost" piece of writing—that you haven't forgotten anything essential. On the contrary, I believe that a second run at the material will increase your sense of confidence as you prove to yourself that you have it within you to weather this bitterly disappointing setback and emerge the stronger.
Good luck with your newer, better, more polished rewrite.
|
|
Joined: 5/10/2011
Posts: 88
|
Ouch!
I've always wondered what it would feel like to lose a completed work. I image it's ten times worse than what I went through last night with my first chapters! Congrats on pushing through and thanks for sharing your experience!
I completely agree: "when fate and cruel circumstance destroys or otherwise erases our writing from this space/time continuum it’s simply the universe saying: Try again. You can do better."
Nothing happens without a reason. So fate, I accept your challenge!!
|
|
Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
|
I lost about 10K of my WIP when I lost a flash drive. I thought I'd only lost a day's work. I was right, but it was a very productive day.
I wound up screaming, crying, trying to bribe people to help me find the flash drive, and eventualy rewriting it. Only thing I could do, but the whole time I was doing it I was thinking "This was better the other way."
|
|
Joined: 5/10/2011
Posts: 88
|
Was the section you'd lost a second/third/revised draft? I imagine if you've already polished 10K worth of your story, fate isn't helping you out with it's disappearing acts!
How'd you feel when you completed the rewrite? Did it turn out ok, or did you still feel that the original was better... in the end?
I guess I'm lucky that the work I'd lost wasn't final... If my computer were stolen or if I lost all of my Perchance to Dream... I think I'd probably go insane!!
|
|
Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
|
A lot of people swear by the Drop Box application for storage.
This is one of my biggest fears, losing a flash drive or a manuscript by accident. I'm new to writing, but I am old hat at writing code and I've lost quite a bit over the years by not properly backing up.
This is overkill, but here's what I do...
Turn on the autosave function on your writing program of choice. Deep in the settings you can change how often it backs up and switch it to five minutes. Even if you go an hour without saving, it will do it for you at 5 min intervals.
Every evening before bed I'll back up all my files onto a flash drive and onto a server that I own that isn't in the house. Every couple of weeks I'll burn everything to a CD and toss it in the safe, you guys can roll your eyes over that one, my hubby does every time.
Let's say you want someplace to store your work that isn't in your home? There is a down and dirty way of doing this. Create an email account with Gmail or any other browser based email client. Email the files to that account from your regular email address. They will be stored off your computer in a relatively safe manner. If your house were to burn down, you could still access the files from any computer.
There are ways to encrypt your files so if your desktop/laptop/flashdrive is stolen the thief would have to be pretty savvy to access your books.
|
|
Joined: 5/10/2011
Posts: 88
|
Ok, so I have to admit, saving everything to a disc once month is a bit much for me... But I do that once a year... mostly just with photos... Maybe I'll start backing up my files once a month!
I've been using Google Documents to share files with myself and ensure that there's a copy somewhere... (so I still have my original, crappier, shorter copy of the work I did last night.. the part that bothers me is that I did extensive revisions... that I can't remember them!)
I'll have to try the autosave function in Word.
Does that still apply if the document was opened from hotmail, but not "officially" saved on the computer?
(I think that's what I did last night - opened it in Word straight from hotmail, forgot to save it to my computer, so when I pressed save, it went to my temp folders and then got lost in the vast, cluttered chopped up void of my laptop)
|
|
Joined: 5/5/2011
Posts: 37
|
There is a possibility that you saved the document to an odd location, have you searched the file name under the whole harddrive?
Or another thing to do is check you temporary folders
|
|
Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
|
In my defense a lot of the backing up is also genetics research I do, pedigree research etc. Transcripts of meetings, scripts and so on.
If you use Word, there is a way to find out where the last autorecover was saved.
Open word, go to Tools > Options> File Locations
Click on the path for the autorecover folder, if Word was saving every ten minutes (the normal setting) you might be able to recover most of what you did.
Hope this helps!
|
|
Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
|
I just remembered, you won't SEE these files in that folder. You'll need to copy that path and then go after the files with word. Just click open document and type in the path, look for the one with the right date/time stamp.
|
|
Joined: 5/10/2011
Posts: 88
|
Thanks Stevie & Ivoid! That's excellent. I'll try that as soon as I get home.
I did run a full scan/search of my computer last night looking for:
1) All files with the same file name as my document
2) All files modified/created yesterday
3) Any files with a ~ in the filename
4) Any .ASD files
5) Any .TMP files
6) um... what else did I do... I think I did a search for my characters name, on the off chance that the autosave/temp file my document was filed under wasn't recognizable... (but I may not have been looking in the right place at the time).
It wouldn't hurt to look again, though I won't waste too much time this evening.
Thanks again for your advice!
|
|
Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 214
|
I use the "poor man's" back-up: I email the most recent copy of my m.s. to myself every couple of days.
I was using stick drives, but after the first one went through the wash, I decided that might not be such a good idea. If I purchase a mac.com account, I have the benefit of virtual back-up, but I'm too cheap for that ...
I really do want an external drive that I can simply back up to, just like the old days.
|
|
Joined: 4/28/2011
Posts: 60
|
I'm a photographer and the photographs on my hard drive are my life. Literally. I have a double back-up system. I have two external hard-drives that both automatically back up my entire computer every night so that if something happens to one of the externals, I have the second one to fall back on.
That's not counting the externals I have of material that I no longer keep on my computer because there's no room for it anymore.
I started obsessively backing up when I lost three chapters of my dissertation when the computer I was working on got fried by the finicky electricity in a Mexican village. That taught me a lesson or two.
|
|
Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 4
|
I spent $80 or so on a Seagate that backs up everything automatically everyday. I also will periodically store my writing on a flashdrive just in case. Both have come in handy.
|
|
|
|