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Accidentally Deleting Your Work

I accidentally deleted the second draft of my WIP, which I had been working on for over a week. I was using Google Docs and I somehow backspaced all of it, and then something went wrong and it forced me to refresh the page, and when it refreshed it was all gone. As far as I know I can't recover it.

I'm really, really angry at myself right now. Anyone have similar experiences and how they dealt with it?

EDIT: Got mine back but this can still be a thread about the subject matter, feel free to post your stories and experiences.
 
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Ireth

Myth Weaver
I'm fairly sure there's an option that will let you revert to a previous version of the doc (i.e. before the last time you saved). Don't ask me how to get there, though. ^^;
 
Oh I'm an idiot. I assumed there was that option but I just now found it, I guess I couldn't find it in panic.

People are free to tell their stories though.
 
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Oh dear! Surely it's backed up somehow. You should do some hunting around on the Internet for how to get it back....I hope you can!

My stuff is backed up to a drive plugged into my USB port.

As for a story of mine, once my laptop crashed and I lost everything on it. I have no idea of the extent of the damage, but there were at least two half-completed novels, a large amount of notes and ideas, and lots of stories in the early stages of development. Luckily I had sent my WIP to some friends of mine, who were able to send it back to me. But that was devastating to my writing.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Scrivener does a pretty good job of taking care of me. My keyboard has this convulsion every once in a while and it starts backspacing and I can't stop it. But even if I have to reboot, when I come back around, most if not all the document is still there.

That said, I also save in multiple locations. Primary save is on Dropbox, but the Backups folder is local. And I dump to a thumb drive every once in a while, which I keep off-site. My house could burn down and I'd still have the novel.

I lost critical data once, many years ago. Never again. I put it right up there with stoves and burned fingers.
 
My favorite short story that I wrote was story about a guy who crashes while drunk diving and then experiences 'going through the tunnel' and seeing an angel, then wakes up in the hospital. On the surface level it was about a guy and a near death experience with seemingly religious undertones, but I wrote a lot of tiny things with implications that it wasn't really an angel but an alien. It was just a little exercise with playing with subtext. It was one of the most enjoyable things I'd written, but I had written it while using a computer that is now my mothers. I mistakenly thought I had saved it in my google docs when I deleted it. I didn't realize that until like a year later, and by then there had been so many things done to that computer that there wasn't any way I would get it back. So now I can't share it, even though I was pretty proud of it.
 

Caged Maiden

Staff
Article Team
I'm the Master of deleting my own work. I once saved over a whole draft with a single chapter. Yep, true story. Bye-bye draft. Luckily, I email things with my critters fairly frequently, so all I really lost was a couple chapters, but whatever, I still broke out in a cold sweat for like half an hour.

Then there's my hard drive retrievals. I've lost two computers and had to retrieve my books (14 books and over 100 short stories, not to mention my thousands of baby pictures) off the hard drives. But the kicker is that some of the files got corrupted and when I opened one novel...it was a line of code and nothing else. Hm..yeah, that was a bad day.

And not to be topped, my last one. Books on paper. I sent two novels to a friend who typed super fast and offered to type my manuscripts for me. And because of a huge catastrophic emergency...I won't ever get them back. So, that's two whole novels (one of them got typed mostly) that are GONE and I have no copy and can never have them back.

Ah...all I can say about it is that it hurts the first few times, but then you know what's coming and know you will survive. A bit like labor, I suppose.

Yeppers, my heart goes out to everyone who loses work, but I'm saying that as a person who hasn't backed things up in 6 months because I'm a bit stupid and can't deal with where to actually store things or how to. I hate multiple saves of work, and since I have so many books, I'm just not sure how to only update the items that have changed since last storing them. :( Yep, so dumb.

And so I'm sure I'll feel the pain of another tragedy of this magnitude, and all I can say, is EMAIL your books to your friends or yourself! HA! They don't get lost that way. Another victory for critique groups!
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
Back when my family used a desktop PC, around 2006 or so (so, well before the days of Google Drive or Dropbox), I had written a poem that was between 80-90 stanzas long. My ambition was basically rewriting the Silmarillion in verse. I'd gotten as far as the tale of Beren and Luthien when I lost it all to a crash. I'd already uploaded the first 30 stanzas to my ff.net account, but the other 50-odd stanzas were lost forever. I was SO MAD.
 
I send saved drafts to alternate emails as an attachment so it just sits there in case I have to access for whatever reason.

I saved over a song I was working on and I'm still pissed about it so many years later. :(
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
False alarms can be fun too. /sarcasm

When I was working on a Camp NaNo project last year, I started with a doc in Word but later saved a copy to Dropbox. After that I got into the habit of just writing in the Dropbox one, but one day I opened the Word doc by accident. Cue shrieks of "AAAAAGH WHAT HAPPENED WHERE DID IT GO" when I saw my last day's work (~1K words) not where they should have been (or so I thought). Thankfully the friend I was shrieking at over Skype reminded me to check both docs. Crisis averted. XD
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
More than a week ago, my PC stopped letting me use word... and basically everything else. Long story short, the entire machine was filled with malware, rootkits, trojans etc... Apparently a few Trojan droppers had been downloading malware everywhere. I had to reset the PC to what it was like when I bought it and guess what. Even THEN I still had malware. Ran every possible anti-malware scanner (After resetting they worked atleast) and now the thing should be clean.


Yeah I lost everything. Luckily my worldbuilding is on paper and I hadn't gone too far into any individual story, due to my chronic restartidis.
 
More than a week ago, my PC stopped letting me use word... and basically everything else. Long story short, the entire machine was filled with malware, rootkits, trojans etc... Apparently a few Trojan droppers had been downloading malware everywhere. I had to reset the PC to what it was like when I bought it and guess what. Even THEN I still had malware. Ran every possible anti-malware scanner (After resetting they worked atleast) and now the thing should be clean.


Yeah I lost everything. Luckily my worldbuilding is on paper and I hadn't gone too far into any individual story, due to my chronic restartidis.

Restartidis...that must be what I have! Lol.
 

TheKillerBs

Maester
I saved a chapter over a novel once too. Thankfully I was able to recover an earlier version so I didn't lose asmuch. The damage was "only" about 2k words rather than 20k.
 

Peat

Sage
Scrivener's autosave once lost me a big chunk of work.

I also once thought it had ate an entire book.

I, uh, yeah. I tend to send out a lot of stuff to other people as I do it now. More fun and more back-ups.
 
Lost a couple of weeks of work at one point -

I didn't cope with it. I got massively depressed and stopped writing for three months. Seems silly now - I wish I'd found a coping strategy.
But did teach me the merit of Dropbox.

I guess I went back to it at the suggestion of my partner - so - perhaps the most successful coping strategy has been supportiveness from those close to me :)
 

Holoman

Troubadour
Google Docs is great for this kind of thing, you can get back previous versions from months ago.

I download all my WIP files every week or so and save them on my Google Drive as a backup though. Always worth backing up regularly.
 
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K.S. Crooks

Maester
Once a week I back-up all my work on an external hard drive to limit the amount of loss I can experience. This method protects documents, pictures and anything else you use for your stories.
 
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