AAAAAAAH! (novel loss, saved one)

[Tama]

So, I lost my first computer with my nano novel on it due to virus death. Thankfully I got a proof copy of it.

Second novel, sequel to the first, written during Camp Nano, so no proof copy. Written on Al's computer which finally died. (The hinges had broken so it was held together with tape, etc).

I emailed last November's novel to myself, but it was written in the generic word processor. I tried opening it in OpenOffice, but get a general input error.

There's a passel of options to open it with, so am I doing something wrong here?

[csquared]

I would be willing to take a stab at salvaging for you if you are willing to send it to me. PM me if you want.

[Pedersen]

Just sent you a PM. I'll try to recover the text if you'll send me the file.

[Tama]

Sorry, csquared, I didn't see your post til after I responded to Pedersen, but thanks anyway!

[JoitheArtist]

Oh man, that happened to me with my '07 NaNo novel, which I LOVED. I lost 7,000 words of it (including the climactic ending) when my hard drive crashed. TRAGIC.

I feel your pain!

[Slayer]

I hope they can get it opened for you! It sucks so bad to lose something like that. Especially when you can see the file, but you can't do anything with it. Bleah. I haven't had that with writing, but with graphic work ;_;

Good luck!

[MoonCat]

I saved a lot of stuff to the sky drive or cloud drive or whatever they call it on Hotmail. As well as on CD's. Hope you can get your stuff back!

[AnaKhouri]

This is one of those times I am glad I have to wrote longhand (I literally cannot sit in front of a screen and write; my brain shuts off). That way even if I lose something (which has happened before), I always have my longhand copy so I can retype it. I keep all my old notebooks in boxes labeled in chronological order just in case I lose something.

[Tama]

Pedersen got it for me. And I would write longhand but if I do that too much my hands cramp horribly. I'm talking 3-7 pages or so. Which is a good pace I guess.

[Jay 2K Winger]

This kind of thing is why I've started saving so much of my writing to Google Docs. It also means I can access what I'm working on from my laptop, the desktop, or when I'm at work between calls. Barring a catastrophic failure at Google, I don't have to worry about a computer crash wiping out my work.

[Kristev]

Google Docs is a great idea.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Google Docs is a great idea.

Thank you. Another reason I started using it is because of something that happened after I bought my laptop.

Most of my writing was in .txt format. This was to save storage space and because a lot of the writing I had done had either HTML or BBCode formatting (which made sense given where I was posting some of it) and it was easier for me to just use Notepad. My writing had been saved onto various USB flash drives.

Well, I decided to transfer my writing from the flash drives into a bigger one, to have it all in one place. The problem was the old flash drives were in FAT format, the new one was NTFS. And somewhere along the way, it corrupted a lot of my files.

Fortunately, I was able to save most of it. I could just copy-paste it from the sites where I'd posted it and still have it handy. Not all of it survived, though.

I did two things to prevent this from happening again. I backed up my saved work by posting it to a private ProBoards board (especially for the stuff with HTML/BBCode coding), and started using Google Docs.

I do still weep sometimes when I come across a piece I'd written that was corrupted and couldn't be restored. One piece I particularly liked because in it, one of my characters had a breakdown where he went into detail about why he hated hospitals, and it was one of my best pieces to that date.