Well, not all of it, but the last couple months’ additions.
I was saving it on a floppy disk. Something, I still don’t know what, wiped that disk out. Gone. Vanished. Forever.
I still have the bulk of stuff in my word program, so it’s not like I have to start completely from scratch, but I still lost a buttload of revisions. I just have to hope I still have enough on the hard drive in my brain that I can recreate it.
It’s just not going to be easy. And I still don’t know how, or why, this could happen. I’ve lost so much…Weeks and weeks of research and poring over words…
Well, two hours on, I’m more confident that I can recreate what I’ve added in the last weeks. My recall for text is legendary, and now I’m proving it. Been typing like a mad demon.
Who knows. Maybe this will make it better in the long run.
I just don’t know what the flip happened. I didn’t put it in my pocket, or anywhere else.
It might be worth checking through the temp files on your hard-disk to see if any later revisions exist. It might also be worth dropping 30 dollars if you have it for a USB pen-drive. Solid state storage, fairly secure, very portable. 30 bucks will get you at least 128 meg these days. Good luck!
Also, at the risk of suggesting the insanely obvious (which it sometimes is), you are checking the right diskette yes? I ahve saved on the wrong diskette a few times before and not been able to work out what happened.
Oh, Rilch, I’m so sorry to hear this. I’ve lost stuff and it’s caused me to be a paranoid maniac about backups. Also, I see so much of this at work. Patrons come in with disks they’ve been using and all of a sudden they can’t access anything on them, or they’re just mysteriously blank. I second Iteki’s recommendation. I have a USB pen drive and it’s a sturdy little thing that hasn’t failed me yet.
And yes, I’m sure it’s the correct disk. All I know is, I tried to bring up the document and I got a message saying “The disk in drive A is not formatted; would you like to format it now?”
Oh, man… A very good friend of mine went through almost exactly what you did when her hard drive died and her floppy backups were unreliable. I can’t do much but sympathize and agree with the other posters - don’t trust anything to floppies. They’re nearly worthless. The USB pen drive idea is a great one. Backing up to writable CD is a good idea, too, but don’t rely entirely on that, either. They’re way more reliable than floppies, but not nearly as reliable as a store-bought CD. As I’m a networking geek I tend to keep multiple copies of anything important on multiple hard drives on multiple computers, sometimes in multiple locations. But that’s just me.
I second pestie’s suggestion. Keep multiple backups in multiple places. One thing I do additionaly is to regularly make backups on a web drive (account on a web site). That should at least survive most potential disasters with your own computer.
Of course, all this will lead to the headache of distinguishing the latest version.
After some research, I think it may actually be a problem with my floppy drive. Some other disks still have documents, but I have a hard time pulling them up. I’m heading off to the library to test these disks on their computers. If they work there, I’ll have to take this thing back to the store.
Thanks for all the advice! Iteki, if you’re there, I still want to know how I get to these “temporary files”!
Oh, I’m so sorry about what happened. I lost three years’ worth of work on my database a few months ago, and I’m still in mourning over it. Hopefully you can fix your problem, as there seemed to be no fix for mine.
Mods, I hope it’s okay for me to give a non-member’s full name, since I am naming him to praise him. I won’t mention his place of employment, but a gentleman by the name of ARTHUR POND helped me retrieve my document! It’s all there! Woohoo!
I told him I’d mention him in the dedications when/if this gets published. (I’m also going to mention the Straight Dope, collectively, but I was always going to do that.)
I have a spare hard drive where I keep my writing stuff, it’s in an enclosure so I can move it around if I need to. And I burn everything to CD once a month/whenever I finish a major writing project. And now I know why.
As well as backing up to network locations and to CD, I’ve learned the hard way to do “live backups” at least every hour, and before and after any major change. If your document is called ‘thing’, saved on your hard drive, do a File|Save As to a new name in the same location: ‘thing001’, ‘thing002’, and so on. At the end of the day, quit your word processor, delete most of the old versions (keep two or three) and make your external backups.
