A Writer's worst Nightmare

My computer crashed last week. It hadn't shown any signs of slowing down, having problems, losing disk space... nothing was wrong with it, then while I was just fiddling around on the internet after a particularly strenuous Friday, BOOM. My hard-drive was completely erased.

Every homework assignment, story, poem, NOVEL that I've written in the past 2-3 years is completely gone. Okay, maybe a few survived in some format, but the majority of my documents weren't backed up. Yeah, that was stupid, I know, but like I said, my computer displayed no terminal symptoms before it died.

...So, yeah, this year's NaNo is gone. Thank god I still have the hardcopy of my '09 novel, but still.

I'm still kind of in shock. The horror is hitting me in little spurts. Honestly, I'm almost glad, because I was planning on doing a MAJOR edit and this way I can just start from scratch, but there was so much I've written that just... doesn't exist anymore.

Anybody else had this happen to them? How did you cope with losing all of that work?

It is extremely disapointing and very depressing. I had that happen when I was 10. I had been writing an information book on Evolution and Creation and I had close to 10k wors, not a lot but back then I considered it a huge document. XD My computer crashed and I lost my whole book.
Last year my brother lost his whole book and it was almost 100k, he was dumbfounded. You can try to take the hardrive to a copmuter specialist and see if they can recover anything, but I don't know.

I had something similar happen to me when I first started writing. I had finally convinced myself to start writing my stories, and wrote the first "chapter" of my first story (it didn't actually have chapters), saved it on my flash-drive, and was going to get back to it. It took me about two weeks to convince myself to get back to writing, turned on my computer... and it wouldn't start up right. It took me almost a year to get my computer fixed so I could start writing again. The only good thing out of it was that it gave my thoughts time to stew and work out plots and characters.

Oh no! Let this be a lesson to us all: back up, back up, back up! Save it somewhere on the cloud! Like googledocs :)

This almost happened to me, too. I'm a USB fanatic. I carry my stories/poems/research/entire life around my neck, wear it like an ultra nerdy necklace with me wherever I go. One day, I decided to do some laundry, and took off whatever shirt I was wearing in front of the washer and tossed it in, not realizing that precious USB had also gotten fallen into the machine's swirl of file death.

But thank goodness! My USB survived, unscathed for the most part. After that, I immediately backed up on the cloud, and vowed to do so at least once a week.

Well, it's been awhile since I've backed up. Time to do it. My life would have been over if that USB stopped working! And I'm not exaggerating, ok maybe just a little, but not by much ;)

But do try to take your computer to a techie. Hubby has recovered many a lost file for this scatterbrained writer.

Oh my god, that's IS a nightmare :O
Take a deep breath, don't scream at innocent bystanders, and here's some chocolate. Always helps me...

I had this happen once when I still used floppy disks to save my files (no, I'm not THAT old :P). Apparently, my dad needed a disk to save something for his bookkeeping, and poof, gone were my files.
I've had at least two copies of everything since then; right now, I'm counting five. Computer, netbook, USB drive, external hard drive, and a USB drive at my parent's house, updated every time I visit.
Oh. Six. I email a .zip file to myself every few months.

Sounds paranoid, but... never again >.>

Ugh, so sorry!!!! At the end of Oct my hard drive had to be wiped completely, but I had backed up because in 2000 I'd lost all my family photos from a hard drive crash. In Dec right before exams my daughter's hard drive crashed and she lost a year's worth of stuff because she hadn't...My husband's hard drive crashed last week, too! (wow, that's a lot of crashing!)

During NaNo I backed up several times a day, and also emailed my work to myself daily and put it in a file (which is good for copyright issues, too). I have a 1.5 terabyte portable drive and use it religiously!

It's a hard lesson, but it seems like one we ALL have to learn the hard way. Everyone I know that backs up religiously does it because they've lost a hard drive unexpectedly. You can use online services like Carbonite that do it behind the scenes, or Dropbox that you have to do yourself. I love Time Machine on my Mac, because it does it behind the scenes as long as my external hard drive is plugged in, and it backs up EVERYTHING - your programs, your photos, your bookmarks... When you do a restore, your desk top looks exactly the same.

Normally, even though it doesn't happen to me very often, I go into a depressed state where I don't write for a whole day. (That's bad for me) I mean, until I get a new idea because obviously if I lose a good portion of a story I'm going to abandon it and start another.

I've had it happen to me once, my computer just shut down with no warning, and I lost a 10k word story I had been working on the whole day. It's nothing compared to losing everything, that would just be horrible D:

I don't have a backup thing, and I should, but I never get to actually buying one. I just write and save every once in a while, and I hope that my dear computer doesn't fail me. If it did, however, I would probably be shattered. I'm almost at 200 pages in one of my stories and it's taken me a good 4 months to write it (on top of homework, school, and actually eating every few days). If I lost all of my documents, I'd be lost.

I hope that somehow it'll all be better for you :P It's like having someone randomly burn all of your hard work, but digitally. It makes me want to yell at my computer, but sadly it has no feelings that I can hurt xD

Somewhat related story. A year or two ago, while at college, I wrote a short story, that I saved to my computer and my back-up flash drive. I printed a copy to edit and then emailed a copy to my Mom, who printed it so that she could read it. I went looking for it a while ago, and it was not on my computer anywhere, it was not on my flash drive anywhere. It was not in my any of my email accounts. It was not in any of my Mom's email accounts. The hard copies are gone too. There were no less than six copies of this story and they all just vanished without a trace. Just gone. And it was so long ago, I really don't remember what I wrote to even rewrite it!

There are some things we should just put down as "It wasn't meant to be." I think this is one of them.

That is dreadful. I couldn't imagine how that would be.
So, get a flash drive/ USB thing to save your stuff on. You can buy cute ones shaped like animals and stuff ^^ so it would be harder to lose.

Also, you can send documents to your Kindle. Kindle Fires have cloud storage, so you would have double the protection. I think they have automatic document backup on any Kindle.

Something like that happend to me... not as bad, but I know what it feels like. See, I wrote my novel by hand, or most of it anyway. So, I'm stilllllll typing it. Yes, It's Feb. and I am still typing. SO anyway, in December, I was typing, I saved it, and went back later, and 10,000 words were GONE poof. just gone. Yeah, so that's my sob story. So, I know how you feel!

My friend lost a story that was almost ready for the editor, along with her partials and revisions. I learned from that one. I do Dropbox, a flash drive and back up to a second laptop. I've never had a computer crash (yet) but i live in terror of losing all of it.

Seconding trying the tech if recovery is worth the cost to you, but be aware that you might shell out a few hundred and not get the files you want.

So sorry to hear that!

I know what it's like to mourn that kind of loss. The first big story I wrote (I was like 12) was all by hand, and when I was finished I left it in a pile on the computer table for about two weeks and then it disappeared.

Me: Where's my story?
Dad: I thought you were already done typing that.
Me: No....
Trash barrel:

It's like having a pet die, isn't it? I don't know if there is any way to cope except to remember that you've got the time and heart to have many, many more words, and better ones. Rewrite the story again, even if it seems daunting, and the essence of the best of the old story will seep into the new one, even if you think you forgot some of your best lines.

These days I just email everything to myself.

I would save stuff on a tablet, also, since you can edit, it's portable, and safe.

I remember having something similar happen to me. It was a couple years ago or so, and I had three chapters' worth of a story all written out and saved on a USB and my computer. I went to type more one day, and somehow...poof! Everything was gone except the title page. I remember staring in shock at the document for a long time before reality sank in and I started saying "where'd it go?" over and over.

Not quite to the same extent, but I can relate:

I usually do an all right job of backing up my work (and by 'all right' I mean I managed not to lose everything in between my once-or-twice-a-month backups), and I actually managed to last December (of 2010) before my computer crashed and took everything with it. So, overjoyed at that fact, I open up my backups to get back to work on my 2010 NaNovel of 52,000 words, and it wasn't there. After staring at the screen and checking over my list of files at least a dozen times, I finally realized that I kept my NaNovel on my desktop during NaNo and hadn't moved it to my writing folder yet. So, when I backed everything up, I completely forgot about my poor desktop'd NaNo.

I was so heartbroken when I realized what had happened (and am still now a little bit when I think of it well over a year later) and I seriously could have cried. It was like losing a group of friends that had kept my company for the last month. I didn't write anything for a while after that (maybe a couple of weeks), and then tried to rewrite bits of that story over again with no luck (it was like watching one of those movies that you've seen a million times and starts to get boring because you've seen it all before), but eventually got back into the swing of things and created what are hopefully better stories and equally bizarre and awesome characters.

Anyway, just throwing in my own story of loss, and telling you that you have my deepest sympathies. So sorry that you lost everything. :( Hopefully it's just cleaning the slate for bigger and better things to come.

(And, if nothing else, your story prompted me to backup things for the first time in a couple weeks)

Same thing happened to me a few years back

Had black out while I was in the middle of writing and when the power finally came back on my hard drive was clean. Stories, music, movies, shows, anime, manga, comics, artwork, everything gone. Was so depressed Y_Y

But I eventually came to see it as an opportunity as far as my writing was concerned. Used it as a chance to let go of stories I was never going to finish and had hanging over my head, and I also used as a chance to rediscover my interest in the stories I did want to finish by reconstructing all the data for them and that allowed me to see plot holes and angles that I previously hadn't been able to see because I was so attached to the work I had already put in and didn't want to change.

So as horrible and depressing as this experience can be, it can also be a great one for those willing to take the opportunity.

Additionally, this is why I also back all my stories up on four different hard drives now; my computers, my laptops, my external hard drive, and a second external hard drive thats just for the story data and that only gets plugged in to update the files on it now xD

After getting half-way through a rewrite of NaNo 09 (around 35k words) my flash drive decided it needed reformatting. Was frustrating and incredibly annoying, but I hadn't written anything in months and I'd already started formulating a new rewrite.

But it still hurt clicking the 'wipe everything' button.

I had something similar (although nowhere near as bad) happen a while ago. Fortunately it was before Nano, but...

It was before I had any sort of large memory space to store stuff, so I relied on USB sticks. One of those USBs had all of my personal projects (stories, art etc). I had backed it up a while before (about a month), and then it died. The computer did not acknowledge its existence. The problem was, I had a story I'd been working on and which had recently had a major overhaul on there, and I didn't have a backup of the updates to it. And there was another story that I had no other copy of (except a basic concept scribbled down into my school diary).

I recently had the opportunity to ask a computer-savvy friend if he could get the files off that USB, and it turned out it was impossible. Bleep. Oh well, I've had another go at the overhaul of the work-in-progress (since I knew I wasn't getting the original back). And I don't know if the other one fulfilled its intended purpose (it was an attempt at a scary story, but I have no way to tell if something's scary or not).

And now I distrust the brand of the USB that died. Especially since a couple of weeks after that I lost another USB of data, which stored most of my non-story documents, all the files I'd downloaded for the last few months/years. And had the same brand. Curse you, Lexar!

Same thing happened to me over the summer. My computer was acting up for weeks and then BAM it stopped working. Every writing project that I'd been working on since I was little completely erased. I got a new hard drive, though unfortunately none of my past life could be recovered. We still have the drive though incase it could be fixed.