Arrrgggghhhhh!!! I was doing a lot of cutting and pasting while rearranging chapters. I copied something to the clipboard, then I guess I was distracted by something else and copied over it without pasting it first. I didn't notice it was gone for several days. (I've been doin' some major renovations and the page count has been jumping up and down constantly.) Gone. Gone from all my over-written back-ups. Good polished stuff, too. Anyway, I found a freeware program, M8 Clipboard that saves everything saved to the clipboard. Won't happen again. But still....
Sadly, losing work in various different scenarios seems to be almost a right of passage for writers. It doesn't make it better, but you're far from the only one. My sympathies.
Happened to me once early in my writing days. Now I create a separate file for every revision I do. It helps recover against untimely accidents and also allows me to reflect on how the story's changed.
I feel for you. I get annoyed when I lose just one page, or don't even have immediate access to my writing. I hope you can recover some of it at least from memory.
Sorry Maybe take this as an opportunity to rewrite that part... better! (Not saying it was bad (since I have no idea), but we can always improve what we've written!) At least it wasn't the whole book.
Truly sorry that happened to you. Remember to keep extra back-ups. You could be extreme like me and save the novel on 8 separate hard drives.
Wow...I thought I was extreme with my 6 backups. Unfortunately I save obsessively, so I overwrote them all. BTW Just discovered Harry Dresden.
I'm trying to "download it from my flesh drive" as I say it, but with mixed results. I remember the plot, but the writing lacks spontaneity.
I do named backups for each day. (111031Backup, 111101Backup, etc.) For things that I really care about, I keep: - Sometimes multiple backups in a day, if I'm doing something I really don't want to lose.. (111031_2-30pm_Backup, for example.) - A daily backup for each of seven days. - A weekly backup for each of four weeks. - A monthly backup for every month back to the beginning of time. - The weeklies and monthlies go on a drive other than my main drive, _OR_ I do a periodic printout, or both. I realize that it's rather annoying to have people give you backup advice _after_ the fact, but maybe it could prevent a recurrence?
Oh, I'm so sorry, Darin. I know how you feel. I've done this to myself so many times, granted not 15 pages. Still, the number never matters. If it's just one paragraph I lose I feel so lost! *sniffle*
I email backups to myself. Even if it's just a chapter. So far that has been my best backup. I'm paranoid about backups.
SVN. Tortoise. Learn to use a versioning solution. You can even make it so it saves your work every arbitrary amount of time. You can have a copy of your work as it was, each 5 minutes, during the last two months. P.S.: If a writer tells you he's never lost some work, hug him and walk away. He probably managed to forget it, to deal with the horror. You wouldn't want to trigger the PTSD.
