John Loeffler's picture
John Loeffler from Brooklyn, NY is reading Gallatian Canyon by Tom McGuane August 5, 2012 - 9:18am

So, my Macbook Pro was stolen a few weeks ago. Right out of my room by either unscrupulous roommates or burglars, though one is just as likely as the other. Long story. But I wanted to say I'm glad to be back online and would caution everyone to have some kind of cloud storage for their work, since I've now lost a ton of writing that I will never see again.

I'm curious to know how we all react when the inevitable happens. When a hard drive fails, when a thumbdrive gets erased or lost, when you accidentally save an older version of a story over the current version and lose all your edits, etc, what do you do? Also, with the advent of GoogleDocs and iCloud and Dropbox, who takes the precaution of uploading their work? 

underpurplemoon's picture
underpurplemoon from PDX August 5, 2012 - 11:14am

There were times I wished that I had kept some of my work, but it reminds me of when my mom was little and her house was on fire. All the photos and all the memories were lost. She was one of many boat people escaping Vietnam in the late '70s, so when she came over here with my sister, she had nothing. She's a great storyteller, and really, you try your best with what you have. Have faith that you'll be able to recover some work from your excellent mind.

Sometimes, I e-mail my friends my work. That way, when I have a writing fit, at least my work won't be destroyed. I e-mail myself my work via Gmail. I'm still a novice at the writing profession, but hope this helps.

cosmo's picture
cosmo July 20, 2014 - 12:38pm

.

ReneeAPickup's picture
Class Facilitator
ReneeAPickup from Southern California is reading Wanderers by Chuck Wendig August 5, 2012 - 6:01pm

Ah, that sucks. That has happened to me more than once when I was still primarily handwriting everything and it suuuuuuuucks. Hurts.

I dealt with it by becoming nuerotic about saving. I have dropbox, and external and a thumb drive. And I like to email stuff to myself. 

ReneeAPickup's picture
Class Facilitator
ReneeAPickup from Southern California is reading Wanderers by Chuck Wendig August 5, 2012 - 6:07pm

Michael J. Riser's picture
Michael J. Riser from CA, TX, Japan, back to CA is reading The Tyrant - Michael Cisco, The Devil Takes You Home - Gabino Iglesias August 5, 2012 - 6:36pm

I actually just finished reworking my file system. I've lost stuff but only on small scale, usually just a chunk of writing when a program/app has crashed and I hadn't saved anything in forever because I was on a roll and not thinking about it (and no autosave was happening).

I draft (mostly) on my iPod Touch with a Bluetooth keyboard, so I have a whole directory structure there. I don't back it up nearly often enough, but try to at least once a week. It should be every day after working. So I upload those to a duplicate directory structure on the PC. When a draft is finished, I import it into Scrivener into another "final" directory structure (basically just anything that's gotten a complete draft and I can begin editing on the desktop). Everything gets uploaded to Dropbox for backup, so both the in-progress backups and drafted work. I also try to keep this backed up on a USB stick also. It works well, but man, it took me a while to develop the system. I used to do some other stuff that just didn't work... was too confusing.

Bradley Sands's picture
Bradley Sands from Boston is reading Greil Marcus's The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs August 5, 2012 - 7:07pm

I always backup my work on dropbox. I've never lost any of my work that was more than a day or so old. A few times, I've lost a day's work for unknown reasons. Maybe when it asked me if I wanted to save after I closed the program, I accidently chose "no." Years ago, a screen popped up that said my hard drive was about to crash and that I should backup my files, so I did that with no problems.

Nick Wilczynski's picture
Nick Wilczynski from Greensboro, NC is reading A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin August 5, 2012 - 9:46pm

Start over.

When I write rhymes I go blind and let the lord do his thing!

And if the Gods choose to dash what I have written across the ground, and to destroy it forever, then there must have been something wrong,and it is time to start over.

I reccomend sacrificing a goat first.

underpurplemoon's picture
underpurplemoon from PDX August 6, 2012 - 9:46am

Sacrificial lamb!

Kirk's picture
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Kirk from Pingree Grove, IL is reading The Book Of The New Sun August 6, 2012 - 10:25am

Spend the money to get a real dropbox account. I keep all of my project files in there. Plus, also drop the extra $35 a year they offer for "pack rat" where they will keep an infinite number of file revisions. So you can always roll back to an old copy of a file if you need it. (normally they only keep 30 days of revisions)

Sound's picture
Sound from Azusa, CA is reading Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt August 6, 2012 - 10:57am

That blows. It's happened to me a few times but, luckily, it was with work that I had not invested much time in yet. I've only started writing seriously in the last year or two. I'd die if my latest work was wiped out. That said, I really should upload to the iCloud soon to avoid that from happening.

JEFFREY GRANT BARR's picture
JEFFREY GRANT BARR from Central OR is reading Nothing but fucking Shakespeare, for the rest of my life August 6, 2012 - 12:22pm

I like GoogleDrive quite a bit. Essentially the same as DropBox, but... I dunno, Google. I have a shortcut on my desktop, plus the tray icons, so I just open those to write. It saves everything, and the next time you connect to ye olde information super-highway, the Googbots will sync you up. It saves thinking, and god knows I hate to think.

If you want to keep all your dataz/porn/instagram pics of your iced tea, I recommend the John Irving methodology:
"You've got to get obsessed, and stay obsessed."

In Hotel New Hampshire, as in life, the way our hero meets his goal is to do reps. Day in, day out, sun shine or rain, do your reps. Practice this magical incantation:

ctrl+s

Do it every time you finish a paragrah, and you'll never go hungry again!

Jack Campbell Jr.'s picture
Jack Campbell Jr. from Lawrence, KS is reading American Rust by Phillipp Meyer August 6, 2012 - 1:05pm

I lost some stuff that I didn't have backed up when my motherboard went out in my desktop computer. There was one short story I was particularly proud of that I have never been able to reproduce. That is when I got a dropbox account. Although one of these days, I am going to get one of my buddies in computer forensics to try and recover that story from the hard drive for me.

Dwayne's picture
Dwayne from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updated August 7, 2012 - 2:06pm

I lost a blog post I really liked once so I decided to never let that happen again.

I write in hard copy for the first draft, have it backed up on two hard drives on my computer, save a CD of all my work a few times a year I keep away from my home, a friend I do some writing projects with has copies of almost all of it, and use G drive to back up on the cloud everything I write. Sounds like a lot but it literally takes less then 5 minutes a month.

Bradley Sands's picture
Bradley Sands from Boston is reading Greil Marcus's The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs August 7, 2012 - 2:18pm

I use a free Dropbox account. I only save Microsoft Word files onto it and I haven't run out of room yet.

Dwayne's picture
Dwayne from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updated August 7, 2012 - 2:21pm

Does Dropbox charge?

Bradley Sands's picture
Bradley Sands from Boston is reading Greil Marcus's The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs August 7, 2012 - 4:46pm

It's free unless you want a lot of space.

John Loeffler's picture
John Loeffler from Brooklyn, NY is reading Gallatian Canyon by Tom McGuane August 7, 2012 - 5:02pm

I'd be interested to know how it affected everyone once something like this happens. I had a novel-in-progress that is now completely lost. I should be devastated, but in one of those bright sides we always hear about, I find it liberating. The story was somewhat rudderless and I was really struggling with it. Now I feel free to start over from scratch and in an entirely new direction without feeling guilty. I'm even excited. 

Michael J. Riser's picture
Michael J. Riser from CA, TX, Japan, back to CA is reading The Tyrant - Michael Cisco, The Devil Takes You Home - Gabino Iglesias August 7, 2012 - 5:20pm

The few times I've lost work I've been pissed as hell, but quickly got over it when I started rewriting. It was all shorter stuff, though.

Bradley Sands's picture
Bradley Sands from Boston is reading Greil Marcus's The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs August 7, 2012 - 6:20pm

I'm always hearing about people losing their books, having to rewrite them from memory, and the book turning out to be much better than the original version. I imagine that would be the case, although I would never rewrite a book like that by choice.

Dwayne's picture
Dwayne from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updated August 8, 2012 - 5:54am

You know, I wonder how much of that is just us tricking ourselves or the improvement you'd get from any revision. I've seen lost works be found after the rewrite a few times when the author was so convinced (and still is to this day mind you) the new one was better when I say, at best, mild improvements. Once the original was better.

misskokamon's picture
misskokamon from San Francisco is reading The Moonlit Mind August 12, 2012 - 10:52pm

I am so sorry your Mac was stolen!

I know that feeling -- that oh-my-god-my-time-and-effort-and-genius-all-gone feeling. I don't usually get it with my writing, but I get it with my other projects all the time. Corrupted files, improper saves, and documents crashing when you've forgotten to save because you've been 'in the groove' for four hours -- yep, that's me.

First thing's first: Get yourself Dropbox.

Once I signed up with dropbox, my life changed for the better. I pay for the 100 gigs every month and keep all my projects stored in the cloud: my artwork, my comic, my career stuff, and my age-old folder titled "Ramblings of the Mad." (Ramblings of the Mad has been the title of my writing folder for twelve years now; it has about ten years of work in there currently.) When I wrote my NaNo project and tried Scrivener for Windows, I lost ALL my work. Scrivener for Windows ate it. But with Dropbox, I could easily roll back to a previous version--the version not gobbled up by Scrivener for Windows. I was thankful for that. Of course, I back up my dropbox folder regularly, too. You can't be too careful... but in the past year and a half of my Dropbox usage, I've never lost my personal files.

Second: check your email and all your storage devices for any versions of your work you might have saved and forgotten. Search the title of your story, or for keywords you might have used. Maybe you'll find something there?

Third: Let Go and Rewrite. It's tough to rewrite projects you might have finished and forgotten about, but for work you lost while in progress, take it as a sign that it was time for a rewrite. When I lose major projects, such as animation things or hours worth personal art, I take it as a chance to take what I've learned and apply it differently. Oftentimes, the final product is much better than the first.