I made myself soooooo mad this week by being an absolute dumbarse. Now I must share this frustration with you.
I got a good couple of lines of poetry stuck in my brain one night and saved it in the notes on my phone so that I wouldn't forget. So far, so good.
At work the next day, there was a bit of idle time between calls so I thought I'd have a crack at making something from the two lines I'd thought of. Now, for some dumb reason Google Docs, Drive and Gmail got blocked at my work a couple of months back even though all the contractors like me have a work email THROUGH GMAIL. Anyway, I'm used to using Google Docs if I'm writing in a browser, but I had to find something else to use since it was blocked at work. I ended up settling on Calmly Writer, which I kinda love.
I put together a couple of stanzas I was happy with (I won't say it was good, I'm sure it was terrible). And then the phones got busy so I minimised the browser and forgot about it. Then at the end of my shift, I closed the browser out of habit ...
Without saving the damn poetry.
I realised my mistake, but alas, it was too late. This app does not auto-save like Google Docs. My (terrible) poetry was gone.
In memory of writing lost, please share your saving failures and tales of writing long gone.
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Usually mine have to do with browser crashes.
ReplyDeleteOr hard drive crashes.
I have thankfully never had an experience like that. Though during NaNoWriMo a couple of years back, my laptop battery fried itself and switched off while I was mid sentence in Word and I lost a few hundred words. That's when I switched to Google Docs.
DeleteWithin the last two years, my computer started crashing at all kinds of odd times for no apparent reason. I self-diagnosed it as either: bad power supply (replaced--nope); failing motherboard; overheating. I believe it was the MoBo (machine was 5+ years old). I never truly lost a documenet, but I often lost what I had been working on for the last fifteen, twenty minutes. FORTUNATELY my wife has an expansion drive and I loaded everything from my machine onto that. A few weeks later, the computer just would not boot at all. I have my autosave set for ridiculously short intervals, and I hit Save ridiculously often.
ReplyDeleteBigger issue for me is having too many different versions of one thing lying around, making it difficult to find when I actually need to remember about that scene in the restaurant I really liked and can't quite remember how it went....
Ooh, the version control trap! I made a folder for previous drafts and shift old files in there as I save the newest version. For essays, I put a date on them to help.
DeleteLucky your wife had an expansion drive handy!
Aaaargh! Losing work is so frustrating.
ReplyDeleteDevastating 💔
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