Disaster on the Open Seas

[lydamorehouse]

Just a quick note to tell you all how stupid I was yesterday. I was moving from one room to another while working on my laptop and.... (drum roll, please)... I dropped it. It landed just _so_ and killed itself. I destroyed my hard drive completely.

This is pretty tragic in and of itself (although, I will admit to secretly wanting a new laptop for several months now,) but the really, really, REALLY dumb part was that the last time I saved my WiP to a flashdrive was... oh, over a month ago, when the novel was half the size it was yesterday.

I lost 30,000 words.

Completely.

Luckily, there do exist a few paper copies and the older versions of the partial. I should probably be more devistated, but I'm taking this whole disaster as an opportunity to do a major revision. I was in the middle of this process before the crash, anyway. Now I'm just double-timing it.

Despite what it sounds like, I don't FEEL like I lost that much. The story was stalling and I needed some kind of a jump start. Plus, most of the stuff I was satisfied with was in the older version anyway. Now I get to revise and rewrite the later stuff that I didn't much like.

What is the lesson here, kids? Always back-up. Back-up everything, everywhere.

The other news is that the Polish edition of ALMOST TO DIE FOR came in the mail the day before yesterday.

Comments

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

This is why I bought an SSD for my partner's laptop - no moving parts to break if we ever do drop it.

And yes, we try to backup regularly too.

[cedara]

I have an USB stick for quick backups of things that I cannot be allowed to lose. Also, certain folders/files for which I deem the same importantce automatically get backuped in my (free) cloud-account once I save the file. Nothing personally sensitive, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Ouch. Have you looked at Dropbox?

Gary