Remember to load your WIP chapters into Google Docs as you write them. Because if you don't, something like tonight will happen when your computer dies, and somehow chapters 5 to 12 are gone for good. For some reason you uploaded 13. Good for you, you senile goat. But what about the OTHER 8 CHAPTERS you now have to re-write to get to 13? So, future me, please, for the love of all gods, both old and new, back up the WIP folder.
Sorry to hear that. Have you confirmed whether or not the storage itself is damaged/unrecoverable? Dead computer can mean a lot of things.
I'm so sorry to hear, Joe_Hall. I hope you can find a way to restore this! Not the Territory has some good ideas; I can't think of any other way, sorry. This happened to me many, many years ago. Luckily, I found the missing chapters on a floppy diskette. Even more luckily, I had an FDD. (I did say it was a long, long time ago. Just not in a galaxy far away).
have you emailed it to someone idk for feedback or something? that's what happened to me. i lost a chapter.... but then realized that i'd sent a version of it to some friends to read. i managed to grab that file and reupload it into my google drives folder. it wasn't the current edit, but it was still better than nothing at all. please say you emailed it to a spouse or friend or relative!
side note, this is exactly how i came to learn about google drives. this happened to me in college. my computer crapped out on me and I lost 2 research papers and my my thesis that i'd been working on. when I said freaked TF out... i was literally sobbing. took it to the campus tech center.... they weren't able to retrieve my previous research papers, but they were able to retrieve an old version of my thesis. then they told me to download google drives. i didn't know what that was... and I didn't have a gmail, either. but they hooked me up and I've been using it ever since that horrifying day
So usually I am rather good with keeping things backed up. I have my main WIP and little side projects and short stories all stored safely. I have multiple drives in my desktop that I use for various purposes, so in the event I loose access to my Google Drive I still have the SSD where I run Microsoft Word and store all my documents and vice versa. I am not sure why I didn't drag them over. Stupidity I guess. I've tried the SSD in other slots and even in an external recovery tool I have. Nothing is getting it working. On the bright side I did partially recover Chapter 12a which had a different ending from Chapter 12b...it had auto-saved to a folder I usually save for actively-being-worked-on PowerPoints on my desktop. It wasn't entirely complete but I'll take not re-writing 3K words. Sadly no. My last critique partner ditched me when I wrote a pretty vanilla sex scene and they freaked out about me writing 'erotica' which they had not agreed to critique. I regularly still send my short stories to my dad, but not my main WIP...yet. I guess I can stop my sob story now my loss wasn't so bad after all. It's just a fantasy fiction that comes purely from my imagination, it was probably all going to be revised anyway, and I'm not being graded on it. Still loosing something between 16,000-19,000 words kinda hurts my fingertips thinking about re-typing it all.
But you got this! Who knows... that version just was not meant to be and the newer and improved version will be just what you need!
