So when I should be working on snowflakes, ideas for a story in progress as well as ideas for a whole nother story started going off in my head and I’ve just got to put them where I can find them again. So I spend Thursday and Friday containing on the page the gush of ideas for this one new story.
Then I spend Saturday working new ideas into a new chapter of a story that’s already in progress. So now it’s late, I’ve hit the wall energy wise, and I’m shutting everything down to go to bed, and I go to save the chapter I spent all day working on and instead of hitting “save” I accidentally hit “don’t save” and watch in horror as all my work goes away.
But wait, I’ve got autosave enabled! So I pull it up again to see what didn’t autosave — and NOTHING DID!!! It was exactly the way it had been before I switched the order of two scenes which necessitated making a third scene into a new chapter. So then I look and, no, the file has not somehow gotten write protected So then I frantically scrambled around looking for previous versions or backup versions and versions from my backup drive, and come up dry. I get to rooting around in the set
tings for Word and discovered that some things weren’t set the way I wanted them set and I don’t know how they got changed. Autosave was enabled, but it apparently wasn’t autosaving. By then, I was so totally bummed that I just shut everything down and went to bed.
So, Sunday, instead of working on snowflakes, I spend the whole day recreating the chapter I lost. Saved it. Made sure all my changes were still there, saved it again, and went to bed. Got up this morning, pulled it up to reread it, and it had somehow reverted to the version I started with Saturday morning! No idea why. So now I’m totally bummed. I start over again recreating all my changes yet again, pausing frequently to manually save, decide to relook at stuff I retrieved from my hard drive backup, and there it is — the version I thought I’d lost from Saturday night. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!
And not to put too fine a point on this whole bummer of a weekend, I found a mistake in a hat I was knitting, ripped out 15 rows of this one section and fixed it. It lacked only a little bit to be finished, so I thought I’d go ahead and finish it, and at least salvage something out of this debacle. Got two rows into the decrease and found another mistake even farther back than the other one. (*expletives, scatological terms, and pejoratives deleted*)
Oh, I’m too much of a perfectionist not to frog it out and fix it, but right now, I’m just too ungruntled to deal with it.
I’ve also learned that I can multitask and knit — read, watch videos, write — but when I crochet, I can’t do anything else except listen to music. That’s yet one more thing that’s made this weekend frustrating. I was going work on these stories until I ran out of steam, and then spend the rest of the weekend crocheting snowflakes. Mmmmumph!
The Owl Underground 
I still remember the moment when I realized I’d just deleted 400 or so photos from my SD card. The card had divided the photos on it into two folders, and I didn’t realize it had done so. After I uploaded photos from one folder, I thought I was safe. So, I deleted — and then watched the nice computer get rid of the second folder.
That’s when I found the program called Recuva. It’s free, or you can get the pro version for ten bucks. When I downloaded and ran the free program, it brought back about half of my 400 photos. After I purchased the paid version, guess how many photos it found? 2400. Yes, that would be two thousand, four hundred. I’d never formatted the card, and they all were there.
The nice thing is that you can use Recuva to reclaim files off your computer, too. I’m keeping that in mind.
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I once heard the terrible story of a man who had virtually completed his PhD thesis and had it stored on his computer when his wife came along and, not realizing what she was doing, deleted the lot. He was so angry that he killed his wife.
Humans are fallible and, being operated by us, so therefore are computers. I always keep copies of all my work, updating the copies as I go. My hard disc failed one day, just before we were due to go on holiday. I had to rush to have a new one installed but was able to recover all my data because – guess what? – it was all backed up in multiple copies.
Recuva is a useful and effective tool and there are others, all free, so there’s no excuse for not having one (or several). It’s also worth looking in the recycle bin too when you accidentally delete something. It’s even easier getting a file back from the recycle bin than using an undelete app to do so.
I can’t help wondering whether the above mentioned murderer, had he been a bit more computer savvy, would have been able to recover his lost documents. If so, a life might have been saved.
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