I have a cautionary tale, especially for writers who store their creative works on their computers. I'd like nothing more than to cover up my failure so that no one ever knows what an idiot I am today. However, Kahlil Gibran had something to say about this in his literary masterpiece, The Prophet. He wrote:
And when one falls down, he falls down for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.
Ay, and he who falls down for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.
So indeed, I did stumble. The tripping stone was my system of backups for my novel. I had decided to rewrite some chapters, or, at least, rework the narrative and dialogue. I had a very productive three weeks and felt I had greatly improved my story. Of course, I do save my files frequently; I have the latest virus and system check software; back up my files to three external hard drives; and keep a copy in the Cloud. The day will come when my computer displays the blue screen of death and I want to be prepared.
However, I got so busy and involved with my work, three weeks slipped by without an external save. Of course, I was clicking on "Save" to update my Word file. My stumble did not come from a crashing computer. In my decades of writing, since the first day I had access to a computer, through countless magazine columns, blogs, letters to the editor, love letters, nonfiction books, short stories, and a trilogy of novels, I had never made the mistake I made over the weekend.
When I took action to save my files to my external drive, I copied what I thought was the latest changes on the book to overwrite the old external backup. Instead, I copied the old file to overwrite the new file. What a stupid screw up! I know how it happened, but the details aren't important.
Somehow the screens got switched. The file directories at the top of the screen do not specify which is my C: directory on my computer and which is the E: directory of the external harddrive. Afterwards, I looked at the dates of the external directories and compared it with the file dates of the dates on my pc. Why were they both the same and three weeks old? They should have had the date of the previous day.
After I gasped for breath, suppressed a scream, and withheld a string of profanities, I did what any writer should do--I panicked! I tried every method I could think of from my experience with computers to undo the mistake. Word is supposed to save automatic restore points. At least two weeks of the mistake were mercifully recovered from the restore point, but there were still consequences for my stupidity. Word should be automatically making recover copies more frequently, but for some reason it didn't. No one in the Microsoft community could explain why that feature is not working, other than I am using an old version of Word that has otherwise worked fine for me.
Here I sit with thousands of words and a good number of work hours shot to hell. I will have to start over with the chapter rewrites. At this moment I'm sympathizing more with Hemingway being driven to drink. I guess you could say I had a bad day. I'll get it back and somehow find the creativity to reboot, but not today. Properly self-flogged, I will just move forward on Monday. Carol says she had a similar problem losing an entire short story, but her rewrite ended up being published. Knock on wood (my head, for example) that my new rewrite will be better than the last.
So, authors, screenwriters, composers, artists, and photographers, heed my cautionary tale. There are 50 ways you can screw up your latest creative work. This is just one of them. Make sure your backups are fail safe.
