Goodbye To All My Work

Posted in Author Unpublished, Musings & Ramblings by

So. I may have just lost everything. Last night, everything was going great. I was several books ahead of schedule, with reviews lined up into September. I was six chapters into writing Daughter of Abraham’s first draft, and my 25,000 e-book library was sorted and cataloged. I woke up this morning to a dead hard drive.

Some of you may realize at this point, that this is the infamous Nom Nom, aka… my current and only file backup since my entire computer died not that long ago and is currently getting repaired.

What’s on Nom Nom? All my music, my entire e-book library… all my years of artwork dating back to 2001, all of my writing/novels, including my list of novel ideas and Daughter of Abraham. My file installs, my game backups… basically, you name it, it’s there. And I can’t access it.

I’m mildly freaking out right now. My husband comes home at the end of the week, just a few days before we leave for Disneyland, and he promises to check it out then (he works on/builds computers for a living) so I’m hoping that he’ll find a way to access it…but if he doesn’t? Goodbye to every single file I own.

Some of it can be replaced. I don’t mind re-ripping my games or music. My e-book library is painful, but a good chunk of it can be re-downloaded off Amazon’s cloud. My artwork, while sad, can mostly be grabbed once more off DeviantART where I have most of it posted anyhow.

But my writing? Family photos? Those can’t be replaced. I don’t have backups of my various novels-in-progress. I don’t have backups of my novel ideas list (which would have gone a long way to making me relieved about the situation if I had it – at least I wouldn’t have lost the core ideas to novels, even if I had to re-write them). All six of the new chapters of Daughter of Abraham were recently stored on the hard drive. I simply can’t replace family photos at all.

Normally, I’d be okay. I usually keep two copies of my files, one on Nom Nom, one on my computer…but since my computer recently died, Nom Nom is all I have. If the hard drive truly is gone, I’m going to seriously cry.

14 thoughts on “Goodbye To All My Work”

  1. Pingback: Weekend Wrap-Up #18 | Author Unpublished

  2. Another idea. My husband bought an external harddrive, rather large one and put all our music and photos on there. Of course we lost the cord LOL. But now, photos are taken so constantly, I keep them on google and google play keeps all your music, unless you have multiple different music sources (amazon, etc). I really like Dropbox because i can access it from multiple computers going back and forth, and even my tablet, but eventually you do run out of free space and have to pay. But if you’re a professional writer, I’d pay for it 🙂

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    • That’s what this one was for me Nom Nom was my extra external drive meant as a backup to my usual hard drive. the problem is, my computer died a few weeks back and is currently being repaired, so I don’t have the original copies of anything, and now the backup has failed too! -__-

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  3. OMG I am SO sorry I would be crying my eyes out. Thats why I have Dropbox. My mom uses something called Mozy you might want to check that out because it backs up everything on your comp to the online cloud etc. Mozy is cheaper than Dropbox, which I am about to have to pay for now b/c it’s filled up it’s free space. For many years I just kept all my manuscripts and etc on flash drives. Then, in 2007 my stupid crappy old computer basically fried my flash drive and I lost a whole bunch of writing that I had started on. I was rather devastated and didn’t actually write anything major for several years. I would DEFINITELY find a way to back stuff up online. Here’s the link to Mozy https://mozy.com/#slide-5. Also, some computer repair places can recover information from hard drives. I kept my old laptop hard drive so that I could someday afford to get it recovered after my laptop decided to crap out.

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    • Thanks for the link! Argh, it’s so awful losing files -_- I’ve always been hesitate to host my stuff in a cloud because those things can be hacked, but between getting my stuff stolen or erased, i think i’ll go with stolen! -__- Computer repair places can retrieve files sometimes, you’re right, but it’s literally hundreds of dollars to do so.it takes very specialized software/equipment. My husband can hopefully do the same thing without the trouble XD (it’s kind what he does for a living!) but if it’s corrupted, there’s not a lot to be done. Luckily I did find a flashdrive this morning that had a second copy of my writing folder. it’s a little out of date (I lost the six chapters of daughter of abraham I had) but it has the outline and everything else, so *sigh of relief* it’s not as a bad as I’d feared… just really inconvenient and annoying. I can live with that.

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      • I would still be crying. I am glad you found the flash drive. That does help. I just filled up my free space on Dropbox and now I’m like…ahh I really don’t trust flashdrives, they can break so easily. I think the online clouds are usually pretty safe, but of course safe is relative I guess. Good luck 🙂

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        • haha thanks, I appreciate it. The timing of this all was just -_- the worst. two weeks from now, everything would be okay. i’d have copied everything to my repaired computer. Why it decided to die now is beyond me -_-

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  5. Really sorry about the crash. Is it possible to contact family and see if they have copies of the pics? I did that when it happened to me and got some pics back. As for the ideas, I hope you can remember some and get them jotted down.

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