My computer ate an entire chapter of A of A!

[inzilbeth]

I hate computers! I've always hated them and after last night I hate them with an even greater passion.

I spend about two hours yesterday evening finally kicking into shape an extra chapter for Aspects of Aragorn. It had been a bit of a pig and I'd been getting nowhere fast with it. So you can imagine my relief when I went to click 'save', fully intending to send it onto Cairistiona and Passolargo for their invaluable opinions.

Well I'm still not quite sure what happen, but the computer did not save it. It was nowhere to be found. Fortunately I have a good friend those knowledge of computers is inversely proportional to my own. But after an hour on the phone, he sadly pronounced my chapter well and truly lost for good. All 11 pages of it!

I didn't burst into tears. It was only a chapter, I told myself; no one died. It was by now after 10pm and I had been up since 4am. I was of half a mind to abandon the whole thing but instead, and I'm quite proud of myself for doing this, I turned around and started rewriting it, though looking at that first line with 11 more pages to go was very daunting. I kept going until 11.30pm at which point I was writing total gibberish. Thankfully, I've not in work this week, so today, I shelved all my plans for the day and kept at it all morning. Five hours later it is at least recognisable as the same chapter though there are still no end of frustrating bits that just don't read the same this time round.

The moral of this story: never ever work on anything without a copy of the original somewhere else. I certainly never want to do that again.

Oh the chapter is called 'Roheryn.'  It'll be here in a couple of weeks [I hope!]

Comments

[cairistiona7.livejournal.com]

Really, sometimes you just want to bash these computers with a sword, don't you? *sigh It's just terrible that you lost your file like that, but yes, lesson learned is always back up the file. One fairly quick although somewhat temporary back up is to simply email the file to yourself. I've done that before when thunderstorms were looming and I hadn't backed up everything for a while and didn't have time to do it while the lightning was crashing around me. But I do think the best bet is one of the online backup services ... I use Carbonite, and I noticed this morning that it had backed up everything in my LOTR fic folder and had one pending to be "back up in 107 minutes" and sure enough, later when I checked, that file was backed up. I don't know how it all works yet (still using the free trial period), but apparently several times a day the little program for it that runs in the background will scan all the files and back up any that have been updated. I really do think it will be worth the money, because I'm terrible about not running regular backups.

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Ah, computer bashing sounds really good to me right now!
That's a good tip about the emailing and I'll look into the Carbonite option. I'm just amazed that the whole thing sank without trace - it doesn't do much for my confidence that it won't happen again.

[cairistiona7.livejournal.com]

That is a really odd thing, that it just disappeared completely. We rely so much on computers and take their dependability for granted--and then something like this happens as a painful reminder that things don't always go according to plan. I'm sitting here staring at my computer tower, daring it to even THINK about hiccuping!