“How can you recover a document that was never saved?”
It’s every writer’s worst fear. Your latest brilliant chapters go utterly AWOL. Check your backup processes, says Ben Ellis, or risk writing your first draft twice…
This is a tale of pain and despair but it should be enjoyable…for you, because it didn’t happen…to you. In a nutshell, I lost 5,000 words (about 3 chapters) of my new novel, HOW WE GOT TO TODAY, during a difficult period writing the first draft.
I’m a switched-on technology user, ex-web developer, well versed in the various methods of backing up your stuff, I even smugly wrote a blog post about it! I’m no mug.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
Back in 2013 on my MacBook Air, little did I know the operating system at the time, Lion OSX, had a ‘unique’ feature where it ‘locks’ documents that haven’t been used for 2 weeks. As I mentioned, I was going through a difficult part of the first draft where every sentence was leading me to a dead end, every character as two dimensional as the last, every metaphor as clear as a 3 legged tennis racket, just a creative nightmare.
So I took a break and went back to my note book to find a way through.
After 2 weeks, I had a plan.
By the way, the other helpful feature on Lion OSX is that you can still USE a bloody locked document so it behaves like an ‘editable’ document. It doesn’t give you ANY clue about what’s going on.
So, there I am, typing away watching the words appear on the screen, hitting save, no warnings appearing, everything’s tickety-boo, this first draft is moving along, I’m gaining momentum, I’m going to make it to ‘the end’!
Then iTunes needs updating and the laptop needs restarting…
…the laptop restarts, the applications open and there is my novel…right at the beginning of Chapter 14…hang on! I was on the home straight of Chapter 16!
Cue swearing. Then mad searching on laptop, Dropbox, desktop, external hard drive – because I wrote a blog post on all the different ways you can back up your work! – then frantic searching on Google for answers. I find out about the helpful locked file feature. I then download some software to recover the file but because it was locked, it was never actually saved, how can you recover a document that was never saved?
*&%$!
As I held my laptop aloft, craving the sweet but brief pleasure of introducing it to the wall at high velocity, I realised I would need this same laptop to continue writing.
I quickly knuckled down and determinedly began rewriting the previous 3 chapters before I forgot them, it was a race against time.
And so I began rewriting the first draft of chapters 14, 15 and 16, again. The quicker I got down to it, the better. The process was time consuming, took about 2 weeks, but it wasn’t as much of a nightmare as you might think. In fact, I came out the other side thinking that writing a first draft twice, would be an interesting way to produce a second draft – yes, it would be a masochistic way of producing a novel but an interesting approach nonetheless.
I got through it and battled on, and HOW WE GOT TO TODAY was the novel that got me a publishing deal.
macOS doesn’t have this file locking feature anymore (thankfully), but I recommend double-checking your backup process every now and then, never be complacent. I haven’t lost anything since but I know computers will do their best to screw you somehow. It’s us versus them.
Ben Ellis’ debut novel, HOW WE GOT TO TODAY, is out now at Amazon and other places. Check out Ben’s website www.b3n3llis.com so he can get excited about the brief spike in visitors.
About HOW WE GOT TO TODAY: How can you find love, when you’ve lost sight of yourself?
Sheridan doesn’t know what he looks like. There’s nothing wrong with his vision, it’s just that he’s the only person in the world who can’t see his own face. Despite this, he has it all going for him – a good job as an optometrist, a nice home, and a wonderful girlfriend. All until Heidi, totally out of the blue, dumps him.
And to make matters worse, not only has she broken his heart, but she’s disappeared. Distraught, Sheridan begins to search for her, and ends up finding himself along the way. . .
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Are you a trad-published author who has their own story about pushing past obstacles to become an Unstoppable author? Want to guest post on my blog? Drop me a line at nicola@theunstoppableauthor.com and let’s see what we can sort out.
What happens when you lose the latest (and best) draft of your novel?