HELL
While computers have done a great deal to make a writer's life easier, there is one way in which words on a screen can never improve on paper. Barring a fire, or a careless spring clean of a room, words on paper can't be easily lost. But words on a screen are only one mouse click away from oblivion.
Yesterday, I began transferring, from laptop to desktop, the work on The Lovers that I had done in the US. The delay in the transfer was due to travel, and the completion of my office, in which I am, or was, happily established. I had about 25,000 words from the US, and before I left I'd managed to get about 30,000 done on my desktop. Due to the vagaries of builders, painters, and assorted other distractions, I'd failed to back them up.
I know, I know. My fault, right? I always back up what I write, but moving house tends to result in routines falling by the wayside. I've been struggling to find my feet, let alone a place to work, in the new house. I think I was just glad to be getting any work at all done while strange men were trooping through equally strange rooms.
So yesterday, in my nice little office space, I transferred one file marked 'The Lovers' to my desktop and, when asked if I wanted to replace the older file with the same title, I immediately clicked 'OK'.
Bang. 30,000 words gone. The prologue, the first five chapters, all gone. As I write this, I'm sitting in a state of near shock. That's three months of hard grind down the drain, and I've undone all that I managed to achieve in the US. A frantic call to the nice, clever computer man who services my Mac gave no joy: I'd overwritten the files, not deleted them. They're gone, and they're not coming back.
This is the first time that I've ever lost so much work. It's beyond frustrating. I was on target to complete the book in October, allowing for time spent touring The Reapers, and now I'm not. I'm not sure that I can even remember what I wrote: I can recall characters and situations, but not the dialogue. The prologue was good, I felt, and a long encounter between a girl and the parents of her murdered boyfriend was moving and more than a little eerie, but trying to reproduce it exactly will be like trying to snatch at smoke. Right now, I want to bang my head against the wall. It's my own stupidity that's caused this to happen.
So what to do? Start again, that's what. Open a new file, entitle it 'Prologue', and begin writing.
And yet that's so much easier said than done.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn . . .
Yesterday, I began transferring, from laptop to desktop, the work on The Lovers that I had done in the US. The delay in the transfer was due to travel, and the completion of my office, in which I am, or was, happily established. I had about 25,000 words from the US, and before I left I'd managed to get about 30,000 done on my desktop. Due to the vagaries of builders, painters, and assorted other distractions, I'd failed to back them up.
I know, I know. My fault, right? I always back up what I write, but moving house tends to result in routines falling by the wayside. I've been struggling to find my feet, let alone a place to work, in the new house. I think I was just glad to be getting any work at all done while strange men were trooping through equally strange rooms.
So yesterday, in my nice little office space, I transferred one file marked 'The Lovers' to my desktop and, when asked if I wanted to replace the older file with the same title, I immediately clicked 'OK'.
Bang. 30,000 words gone. The prologue, the first five chapters, all gone. As I write this, I'm sitting in a state of near shock. That's three months of hard grind down the drain, and I've undone all that I managed to achieve in the US. A frantic call to the nice, clever computer man who services my Mac gave no joy: I'd overwritten the files, not deleted them. They're gone, and they're not coming back.
This is the first time that I've ever lost so much work. It's beyond frustrating. I was on target to complete the book in October, allowing for time spent touring The Reapers, and now I'm not. I'm not sure that I can even remember what I wrote: I can recall characters and situations, but not the dialogue. The prologue was good, I felt, and a long encounter between a girl and the parents of her murdered boyfriend was moving and more than a little eerie, but trying to reproduce it exactly will be like trying to snatch at smoke. Right now, I want to bang my head against the wall. It's my own stupidity that's caused this to happen.
So what to do? Start again, that's what. Open a new file, entitle it 'Prologue', and begin writing.
And yet that's so much easier said than done.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn . . .
posted by John at 8:48 AM
30 Comments:
So, in this case, Sartre was wrong. Hell isn't others, it is one's self?
Oh, that's nasty.
In your situation, if I were you, I'd try getting a second opinion, possibly from some data recovery pros. If I'm understanding it right, you had 5,000 more words on the old file (so depending where the overlay is the smaller and can't overlay all) - they may at least be able to recover that...unless it's better to just start over than to get some of it. (programmer in a past life, mostly the old technology).
I know it was valuable. I'm on the last couple of pages of "The Unquiet" - it's bitchin.
It may be worth checking your 'temporary files' to see if the previous version is there. Perhaps you already tried this.
Eamon.
Holy Moully,
I know that feeling, utter, utter, utter devastation - but the best advice is switch the machine off and take the hard drive to a data-recovery specialist - as the overwrite might have a 'sector-overlap' - so you might have some of the new stuff somewhere. The temp folder idea might also be an option, but I guess you've tried that, and depends on your word configuration -
It happened to me a month ago as I was distracted by a phonecall, and when prompted to 'save changes' - I said 'no' and lost a days work - which was bad, but in the context of your loss - inconsequental.
Just keep your chin up - I can think of worse things that could have happened, but as my imagination is not as dark as yours, I'm sure you could think of even worse predicaments - That might retain some of your sanity.
Best wishes for what it's worth
Ali
God John.
That's dismal. You must have cried. Talk to Josh. He's the resident IT specialist and if it's recoverable he'll know how to do it or know someone else who'll help.
Oh John, that is a heartbreaker. I agree about contacting a computer pro and see what they might be able to do for you.
And I know probably don't want to hear this right now, but a suggestion for the future....set up a Yahoo email account for each new book and at the end of each day email the days work to the account. You can access the information from anywhere, download to as many computers as you want, as many times as you want and the original email is still saved there. I only recently heard about this idea myself and almost feel out of my chair.....so easy, so simple...why had I never thought of it.
Again, sorry for your pain.
John,
I don't want to pry where help isn't needed, but if you want I can get a couple of my mac tech's to look at it. It's possible that they won't be able to retrieve anything, however there is no harm trying. The important thing now is to NOT save anything else to the hard drive until retrieval is attempted.
Feel free to email me or give me a call if you need the help.
I've never posted here, but found out you had a blog, and this one in particular hit home.
I don't think there's anyone that hasn't encountered a situation like this.
It sucks that we have to learn the hard way how to organize and backup files buy suffering a monumental loss. My brother informed me that as a software engineer he has a whole version control system for all code he writes. So basically backup is intrinsic to his system so there can never be a "Crap! I overwrote this file!" situation.
And unlike the very encouraging words of others, unfortunately I don't believe you'll be able to recover that file. Overwriting a file is very much a permanent state unless you have your computer auto-saving backups of your files.
Now if you were a cube-jockey writing this file on a laptop hooked up to a server, your file might've been backed up on their server overnight.
Otherwise you're out of luck. I recommend indulging in something that will lift the spirits. If it were me, it would entail a good glass of Merlot, a slice of Godiva cheesecake from Cheesecake Factory, and perhaps a round or two of my video game of choice (usually something involving exploding monsters or the like.)
Sorry to hear that John.
Don´t do anything on your computers, and take them to a computer specialist a.s.a.p.
There is some kind of software available that could possibly recover most of the data.
Hope it will be recovered soon.
Best wishes, Helga
Thanks to all of you. Tried emailing you, Josh, but it bounced back! Anyway, have begun to soldier on, and the process of writing the lost material again has already begun. Could have been worse, I guess.
John,
Not sure why it bounced, but here are both of my email addresses.
Josh.schrank@notes.udayton.edu
josh_schrank@yahoo.com
Seriously, if you haven't saved anything to disc yet, it might not be too late. Data isn't placed down exactly on top of things you are replacing, it is placed on the first open area the disc has available. Even if the file is over-written, the data may still be available. We can try and get it for you, albeit in rather plain text form. I am assuming however, the words are what are important to you, not the formatting at this point. Jayne also has my email and I believe my phone number if you need it.
I once had a laptop computer with quite a bit of work stolen from my car. Friends asked if I had backed everything up on floppies. (This was a while ago.) I said, sure. They were in the case with the laptop.
Damn.
Hi John I know this isnt exactly the same but using commercial and free tools I recovered a bunch of mp3 that I have accidentally deleted.
This post seemed to help others in a similar situation http://ask.metafilter.com/45828/Can-we-recover-a-savedover-Word-file
http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/
File Scavenger (http:/www.quetek.com
Jesus. I can't even imagine the feeling, John. All my sympathy. I think I'd be tempted just to start something new at that point.
Anyway, this gets filed in the woulda-been-a-lot-more-helpful-last-week category, but you might want to look at a program called Mozy (mozy.com). It's a very simple utility that scans your computer when you aren't using it, notices what's changed, and automatically uploads those files to a remote server. Unlimited space on the server runs $5 a month; the software itself is free. Setup takes 5 minutes, and then you never again have to worry. It's the best $60 I spend every year.
Meanwhile, again, shit--sorry, brother.
All I can say is, "ouch!"
Now THAT's a horror story. I print out each day's work on paper. I always thought I was being old fashioned, but I like something I can hold in my hand. Then again, I don't write when I travel, and my words aren't anywhere near as beautiful as yours.
Sorry you're having to deal with this, John.
Well a little good news to cheer your heart after this crisis -
http://centralcrimezone.blogspot.com/2008/03/crimespree-awards.html
I loved THE UNQUIET and an excited about THE REAPERS
Ali
I had half the damned thing written and the system crashed (physically and metaphorically). I know it sounds so much a version of the dog eating my homework, but it’s true.
Round One resulted in three years of illness and anger and confusion. Months and months of court dates, and then a brief reprieve, seemed to settle things out. But then, fresh beginnings were stifled by even more of the unexpected. Bring on Round Two, and more of the unwanted this and that. The whole of it came unraveled and resulted in creative memory as model for tabulae rasae.
But now there is resignation, and even more than reprieve.
Point is, when things are going on and there’s clutter in your life, it’s natural for some of us to be stressed and preoccupied. It doesn’t take much at all to be thrown for a loop. And that’s the human side of it. Upside for you is the end result. I’m more than willing to bet the farmstead that efforts at replacing all that you lost will result in even richer detail.
My system (cheapo DELL desktop that it is) really did crash. But that’s okay. I’ve since learned to rely on portable SanDisk and PNY.
The only enemy now is Father Time, and he’s been fair about all the rest.