Thursday, May 05, 2011

Oh, The Humanity!

If you don't follow my personal facebook page, which is not to be confused with my professional facebook page, where all the photos are, you don't know that I was quite seriously traumatized yesterday. I realized that I had lost Chapter 11 of a fifteen chapter (to date) work in progress.

I understand how it happened. It's totally logical. A couple of months ago, I started working on the bedroom laptop for a half an hour or so first thing in the morning. This has really improved my output. But on the laptop I save directly to a flash drive (also known, I'm told, as a thumb drive, and, at our house, as a sticky thing). I also work on a desktop in the office where I save to the computer's hard drive. I save the hard drive's work to the flash drive and transfer the flash drive's work to the desk top's hard drive, thus, presumably, always having two copies of everything.

Things became more complicated about a month or more ago, when I decided to write a new Chapter Six. Each one of my chapters is kept in a separate file. So once I did a new Chapter Six, the original Chapter Six became Chapter Seven, and everything had to be moved from that point.

I am sure there is some logical, techie way to have renamed everything, but I shuffled instead. Between the moving back and forth between drives and the shuffling, Chapter Ten, which should have become Chapter Eleven was lost, and Chapter Eleven and Twelve were duplicates.

Sad, sad, sad.

Well, guess who saved the day. Yes, yes, that's right. Computer Guy. He backs up the desktop's harddrive every week, but he doesn't override past backups because...Well, we won't get into that. It is enough to say that he was able to find the missing material in the back up from a few weeks back.

I didn't work much today because am still recovering from this experience.

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