I just had the biggest scare of my life.
Moments after finishing Worlds Away from Home, I opened the spreadsheet with my daily wordcounts and noticed that it was missing all the data from the last week. All the data. Not sure what to do, I saved Worlds Away, closed it, reopened it…and found that everything I’d written in the last week was lost.
I almost had a nervous breakdown. I had just finished the last scene, written the last sentence, brought the story to an emotionally poignant ending–and it was all gone.
I freaked out. Searched through all the temp folders, found the backup path for openoffice and searched that–it was all gone.
Not sure what to do, I plugged my flash drive into my other computer, brought up the document, and THANK GOD it was all there. Everything down to the very last line that I’d written only moments ago.
Oh man, you have no idea what I was feeling right then. I collapsed to my knees and promptly saved a two backups, one of the document, the other of everything on my flash drive.
Now I’m scared to plug my flash drive back into my desktop computer, though. What happened? Will I lose all my data again?
Maybe this will help: While I had my novel open, I plugged in another storage device to a jack next to the one my flash drive was plugged into. You know the tone that windows makes when you unplug a USB device? It made that noise twice, as if I’d just unplugged my flash drive. Later, I unplugged the second device, I think it did the same thing, but I’m not sure.
Also, when I opened up the documents I’d been working on on my other computer, I noticed that while my novel (which I’d had open prior to plugging in the second device) had its most recent save, the other documents only had the data from my save on the previous night. In other words, while everything I’d written in my novel tonight was saved, anything I’d written in anything opened after plugging in the second USB device was not saved.
Clearly, this must be a hardware problem of some sort. Perhaps something on the motherboard isn’t fully plugged in? Dang, I’ve got to fix it–I can’t afford to have another scare like this.
Sorry I haven’t posted much recently–I’ve been very busy with this novel. Expect a post sometime tomorrow about finishing it.
A little while ago, I sent my UDISK through the wash in my pants pocket. Then, the dryer. I lost a week of work on a novel. Ah, Fortuna, how you forsake me!
-bn
I am SO paranoid about losing my writing. I try to save to the computer, to a flash drive, and to my Gmail on a regular basis. I’m even worse when it comes to writing a long essay for school–I’m practically emailing myself every couple of paragraphs then. XP
Hope you can fix your computer! I’m afraid I know next to nothing about how computers work.
Oh man I hate that.
That’s one of the reasons I always save everything directly to my Dropbox folder. Knowing I’ll always have an online backup is extremely reassuring. Of course, that still requires me to hit “save” every once in a while, a harsh fact I learned after NOT saving and losing a good day’s worth of writing.
As for your computer…have your USB drives fritzed before? It could either be a problem with the ports or the flash drives themselves; it’s hard to determine. I’d backup everything on the flash drives and experiment if you have the time, at least in an attempt to determine what is the cause of the problem.
Hope that helps.
I do the same as Nathan: save directly into the Dropbox folder. It not only keeps the online backup, it keeps different versions for a month, so you can go back if you realize you accidentally deleted a big chunk and then saved it. Also, it synchronizes your documents between multiple computers — between a laptop and a desktop, for example.
Here’s my theory as to what happened with your files: A week ago, you saved your novel and your spreadsheet on your computer. You then saved them to your flash drive using “Save As….” After that, either you had the documents open constantly, or you opened them using the recent document items in the file menu of Word & Excel (or whatever.) That would access the version on your flash drive, so as you saved changes, you were saving them directly to your flash drive.
Then, today, after finishing, you went to open your spreadsheet by going to the folder on your hard drive. But that had been saved a week ago. And when you went to access your novel from your hard drive, same thing. So your flash drive was current, but your hard drive was not.
Interesting. Now that you mention it, I did save a copy of both documents to my hard drive about a week ago as backup, and I have been using the ‘recent documents’ folder to access them. The weird thing, though, is that I went to the folder on my flash drive to open the documents, and that’s when it reverted to the older stuff and gave me a huge scare. At least, that’s the folder I think I had open–I don’t know why I’d have the backup folder open anywhere.
Either way, I’m going to have to look into getting something like dropbox to make sure this doesn’t happen again.