Here’s a first for me. I’m blogging from my phone. Why you ask? Because I am a complete FAIL. I save like a maniac and am more organized than Martha Stewart where my writing is involved but I don’t back up my files. Ever.
I finished a new sweet romance on Friday night for Honey Creek. I LOVEd it.
I spent 24 hours running final edits for Death by Chocolate – which will release in 2 months as of Sunday afternoon.
Then Sunday night I got the blue screen of death and my computer no longer knew it had a hard drive. It was all, put in the disk. What?
Yeah.
So, I lost everything I have EVER written. I lost THIRTY guest blog posts I completed and saved for my very first blog tour – scheduled to begin in 9 days. I lost my calendar for the event and the galley of the book too.
I lost an ELEVEN page outline for a workshop I’m giving next month.
I love 52K words written during Nano for the Death by Chocolate sequel – due to editors in a few months.
It’s aaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllll gone.
I can only blame myself.
Hubsy has ordered an identical hard drive from somewhere in New York and it’s on its way. When it arrives, he will open both drives and swap out the mechanism we assume is frozen…called a platter I think. I couldn’t hear him through my sobbing.
If he succeeds, I’m all set and ready to save to the cloud, to my email, to a thumb drive and external harddrive, anywhere and everywhere all day everyday.
If the procedure fails….I learned a really tough lesson. Either way, I know most people can’t just ask someone to do this for them and to send away can be upwards of $1K and still get no results. So, I want to encourage all of you who aren’t in the habit of saving to a secondary source…do it. Check out online sites like carbonite or drop box if buying anything like a new thumb drive is out of the question, heck, send it to yourself in email, anything is better than where I am right now.
But as always it’s a little easier for me because I have you. *sniffles* *puppy dog eyes*
Hope this posts saves someone a little grief in the future 
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Julie, I am so sorry to read this post. I truly hope a technical miracle will come through for you and you will get your work back.
(I learned a lesson years ago when, of all things, my “On” button stopped working. Long-story-short: It would’ve cost more to fix the hardware than to take it to the repair shop and have them transfer all of my files to an external hard drive, so that’s what I did. Thankfully it wasn’t a software problem and everything was there – but it was enough to scare me. Now I back up everything to the external.)
I am so so sorry. I hope that the hard drive fix works for you. Keep us posted.
Oh, I am SO incredibly sorry. I hope that you can salvage what you have.
*****hugs***** again. I’m so sorry. I lost a lot last year to a glitch but only one story and because I’d been emailing chapters to my hubby to read I didn’t nearly what I could have. I have multiple USB drives now for backup, Two small-ish ones for most of my files and another one for files I update more often — like my novel. I usually put the files I’m saving into a folder with the date so I’ll know what’s from when, if that makes sense.
Oh and I went all PSA-y after my problem too. *hugs*
Thanks for the harsh reminder =/ Best of luck retrieving your work — I am confident it’s in there somewhere, and someone will be able to figure out how to get access to it!
Ouch. Big ouch.
It’s that sinking feeling followed by the sweats –not nice. I hope you manage to rescue your work Julie.
I wrote this article after the same thing happened to a friend. It covers backing-up as well as using cloud computing to so that whatever happens you can always access your work. I know it’s too late now, but it should help ensure some peace of mind next time.
http://simoncornish.blogspot.com/2011/09/when-did-you-last-back-up-your-book.html
So, so sorry! I don’t have a perfect method in place yet (good reminder!) but I do back up each days work by emailing a copy of it to myself in gmail, something anyone can do if they don’t have a better system in place.
I sure hope the fix works! Really, really do!
OMG! I hate the blue screen of death. Ditto the black screen of death. They are evil. I am a sporadic backer-upper. You may have just changed that! Thank you. Did I say OMG? Ugh.
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This has always been one of my favourite blogs! Just so you know I haven’t foprgotten you..xox
OH NO!!! I know you’ve put a lot of work into getting those posts done in advance, let alone all the work on the books. I had a new flash drive go out on me. Luckily I didn’t lose much, but it made me transfer everything. I now have copies on a flash drive, my lap top AND an external hard drive. Cost me $69 to get most of my files back. Luckily, I only lost files not associated with writing that weren’t essential.
Let me know if you want to reschedule your guest post. I will completely understand.
Melanie
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