Sunday, February 20, 2011

Writing Loss

I almost lost everything again. Let me explain. Back in November, my then-laptop crashed. Foolishly, I hadn’t backed anything up, and so everything I’d written was completely gone—nobody I talked to was able to restore the information I’d lost. Pictures, music, games—I didn’t care much for those things. The devastation came from the lost year of journaling, short fiction, poetry, school work, and other creative documents that were suddenly stripped away. For a time, I was inconsolable, and didn’t even try to think about the notion of replacing the hundreds of hours of work I’d poured into them.

But eventually, I got this new laptop and did my best to move on, backing up my writing at least once a week. I backed up my files last night, without delving into much. Then today, I tried to open one of my papers, and my computer gave me an error message. Panicking, I quickly moved through my other creative folders. Nothing was opening. I hadn’t fallen off the edge of worry yet, but I could feel absolute despair beginning to well inside me. I was concerned that the files had become corrupted, and in my blind copy last night, I had also corrupted my backup files.

Fortunately, a friend offered to let me use his computer to check my flash drive, and from his computer my files were fine. Thank Christ. If I would have lost everything again, I probably would have given up writing for a long, long time. There’s still a problem with the word processor on my laptop, but at least my work is safe.

Close. Fucking. Call.

7 comments:

  1. Sounds like a shitty situation.

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  2. I'm glad you were able to recover everything! :D

    Sorry to hear about that happened last time. I know the feeling.

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  3. Yeah, you should back up always, or upload it somewhere.

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  4. Scary stuff you went through. Also, if it won't open in word or something, try opening it as plain text in notepad. If your text is still there, you're usually fine.

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  5. Autosave every 60 seconds! Also, there are plenty of online services- if you consider something like Google's office suite, you won't have to worry about your laptop crashing.

    Alternatively, purchase a better computer!

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  6. Wish I could say, "I have no clue how you feel, sorry!" But of course I DO know how that feels. My back-up external hard drive SOME HOW managed to fry it's entire insides one day while I was backing up all my writing and artwork.

    So I lost over two years worth of backed up work... ;___; Took it to a specialist who told me there was nothing he could do.

    I felt entirely lost and empty; I never wanted to work on a creative piece again. To some it's no big deal, but for folks such as yourself that's your entire creative collection right there. Shit sucks. It's like being a writer/artist and having your entire work room just burn down with all its contents inside.

    Glad you got this incident fixed, though!

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  7. I always use an USB stick or my external HDD to back things up. If you're broke, just use your email, send emails to yourself with the attachment.

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