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

[nierielraina.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you didn't save it in some obscure location by accident? That has happened to me before. Check your temp docs and all your folders!

One way to eliminate this from happening as well is to save that doc as soon as you open it as a file. Then every line or two you type, hold CTRL and type 's' and you automatically save your work as you go. I learned that after losing a couple chapters myself, so I sympathize.

*hugs*

[lissas-elves.livejournal.com]

Auch! How terrible for you - Im really sorry to hear about this :-(

But it's just amazing that you went right back to work and attempted to recreate the whole thing! I hope you manage to get it polished into shape, but it can be incredibly difficult to remember the words that flowed so easily the first time around. *keeps finger crossed for you*

NiRi's advice about creating the file straight away and save often is sound, but if one gets carried away it's easy to forget.

Do I sound as if I know from personal experience? *coughs* Of course not!

[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.

[calen-greenleaf.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I hate it when that happens!

It's happened on a number of occasions...

[estelcontar1.livejournal.com]

Sooooooooo I was right, and it was computer related. Computers sometimes suck biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig time, don't they?

Niriel's advice is a good one I always save the text everytime I finish a paragraph. When I'm writing long texts on the net I usually keep a back up copy on Word because there has been many a time I wanted to throw my computer out of the window after loosing huge texts I was emailing someone, or something similar.

But you're a brave one to start writing it all over again yesterday after such a frustrating experience and after such a tiring day.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

Oh no,I truly feel for you!It is the most horrible feeling.I was fed up when I lost a drabble the other day!

I try to remember to use google docs as backup.

I'll look forward to reading your rewritten chapter.

[arwen75]

I hate computers eating documents - happened to me several times when I was writing up my PhD thesis. Resurrecting what I'd just written then was fun. That's when I learnt to save as I go along - and to be honest I have the autosave function in Word turned on for a reason :D Lost too many important documents for work not to. Last week I lsot the best part of a lecture thanks to PowerPoint crashing on me - thankfully I had backed it up so it was in fact only 20 mins or so's work I lost but still....

Have to agree it is frustrating - but your best friend is Ctrl-S - use it regularly and this things will hopefully be a thing of the past :D