I just had the biggest scare of my life.
Moments after finishing Worlds Away from Home, I opened the spreadsheet with my daily wordcounts and noticed that it was missing all the data from the last week. All the data. Not sure what to do, I saved Worlds Away, closed it, reopened it…and found that everything I’d written in the last week was lost.
I almost had a nervous breakdown. I had just finished the last scene, written the last sentence, brought the story to an emotionally poignant ending–and it was all gone.
I freaked out. Searched through all the temp folders, found the backup path for openoffice and searched that–it was all gone.
Not sure what to do, I plugged my flash drive into my other computer, brought up the document, and THANK GOD it was all there. Everything down to the very last line that I’d written only moments ago.
Oh man, you have no idea what I was feeling right then. I collapsed to my knees and promptly saved a two backups, one of the document, the other of everything on my flash drive.
Now I’m scared to plug my flash drive back into my desktop computer, though. What happened? Will I lose all my data again?
Maybe this will help: While I had my novel open, I plugged in another storage device to a jack next to the one my flash drive was plugged into. You know the tone that windows makes when you unplug a USB device? It made that noise twice, as if I’d just unplugged my flash drive. Later, I unplugged the second device, I think it did the same thing, but I’m not sure.
Also, when I opened up the documents I’d been working on on my other computer, I noticed that while my novel (which I’d had open prior to plugging in the second device) had its most recent save, the other documents only had the data from my save on the previous night. In other words, while everything I’d written in my novel tonight was saved, anything I’d written in anything opened after plugging in the second USB device was not saved.
Clearly, this must be a hardware problem of some sort. Perhaps something on the motherboard isn’t fully plugged in? Dang, I’ve got to fix it–I can’t afford to have another scare like this.
Sorry I haven’t posted much recently–I’ve been very busy with this novel. Expect a post sometime tomorrow about finishing it.