Forgot to save. What are your stories?

[msstice]

Late last night, as I finished revisions to chapter N+1, saved everything, then did a read through of chapter N. After a while I was going "This don't look right. Something's off." I read more, skipped backwards and forwards and gradually it dawned on me that _somehow_ I'd lost all of yesterdays work on chapter N. I went through a period of denial last night and this morning until I reconciled myself to the loss. NBD because it's fresh in my mind, but of course, now, for ever, that lost version will be _the perfect_ version of the chapter ... So, what's your story of forgotten saves that'll cheer me up

 

[Yozh]

Not my story really, but an incident I witnessed that happened to a coworker. She had to bring her 4 year old to work because no day care that day and had a deadline to get a written program off to print. Middle of the afternoon the kid is playing on the floor and says “Mommy, what’s this?” And yanks the computer plug out of the outlet.

 

[Toby Frost]

I knew someone who wrote an entire novel and then dropped her laptop into a swimming pool.

I was once commissioned to write a story for The Immersion Press Book of Steampunk (it's called "Rogue Mail" and is about a robot postman). I somehow managed to lose half of it about a week before the due date. Luckily, I had most of the jokes written in another file, and could remember the plot pretty well, but I don't write quickly, and it got pretty frantic. I got it in just in time!

 

[HareBrain]

I knew someone who wrote an entire novel and then dropped her laptop into a swimming pool.

I've felt like that sometimes.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I knew someone who wrote an entire novel and then dropped her laptop into a swimming pool.

I wish that had happened to some books that I had the misfortune to read.

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

Late last night, as I finished revisions to chapter N+1, saved everything, then did a read through of chapter N. After a while I was going "This don't look right. Something's off." I read more, skipped backwards and forwards and gradually it dawned on me that _somehow_ I'd lost all of yesterdays work on chapter N. I went through a period of denial last night and this morning until I reconciled myself to the loss. NBD because it's fresh in my mind, but of course, now, for ever, that lost version will be _the perfect_ version of the chapter ... So, what's your story of forgotten saves that'll cheer me up

Mine isn't a forgotten save story, but a save gone horribly wrong story. It'll be five years this December since it happened, but that book I've been trying to resurrect that my old laptop ate? It happened while I was saving my newest additions to the book. So, I didn't just lose one day's worth of work, I lost over two years worth of work because it corrupted the entire file beyond repair or retrieval. Nearly 115k words gone in an instant when in just a few more days I would have finished the book and been on to editing and publication prep. There might have been a chance that an older version was floating around deep in the hard drive, but pretty much all chance of retrieving it was lost because one of the tech repair places I went to for help whipped the hard drive without my permission because they encountered an error while turning my laptop on. It game them a blue screen and instead of simply pushing the button to force it to turn off and then trying again they overreacted and whipped the whole thing. Thankfully, they at least cloned my hard drive first, but they very nearly made me lose far more than just the one book as they weren't even sure that they could get everything else restored. Never, ever, ever will I take another computer to them.

 

[msstice]

@Laura R Hepworth that is a painful story indeed!

Big documents (say the size of a thesis or a novel) always seem to pose challenges for word processing software. I know that MS Word is the most popular, and Google docs is catching on. When I last used it, MS Word wasn't good at big documents. I use Google docs for smaller one to ten page efforts. I use neither for my novel.

If I had to pick, I would use Google docs with one doc per chapter. I like google docs because it saves everything you type automatically, you can have named revisions and it's saved on Google's servers, so no hassle with backing up and you are not tied to a single computer.

My current workflow is hella janky, but I'm used to it: I use plain text files with a plain text editor (I used to use Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined but now I use Vim (text editor) - Wikipedia) one file per chapter. I use a versioning system to back them up. I'm comfortable with it, but for anyone who is not technical and for the sake of just getting on with writing I'd point people to the Google docs + one chapter per doc idea.

The only risk there is losing access to your Google account, so it might be worthwhile making two accounts, or periodically downloading the docs to a computer ...

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

@msstice I was using Open Office at the time, but I've now switched to Libre Office.

I think part of the problem is that my laptop was also just starting to wear out and just happened to glitch at that moment while I was saving. It was a really weird glitch, first the program went to non-responsive, then everything stopped responding and soon after everything went black, but the music I was listening too on Amazon kept playing. had to push and hold the power button to force a shutdown and when I restarted everything and went to open the program it was as if it had reinstalled itself. Had to go through the whole initial setup process and it had lost all record of previous documents and was just a clean slate. From what I've learned since, others have had files with the same type of corruption issue that mine has and no one's been able to figure out how to fix it yet.

I now keep about four different backups.

 

[Oligonicella]

@Laura - Same thing as far as Writer is concerned. They haven't done any noticeable upgrades to it. Still has the page jumping problem, the next line capitalization problem and others that have bothered me for 15+ years.

As for backing up, I worked IT for 35+ years. It's second nature and anything automatic I have set up.

 

[The Big Peat]

... think I'll back up some of my stuff tonight