I don’t know why, but I decided to back up all of my word documents on Tuesday night. You know, just because. Backed them up, then continued working. Wrote about 2000 words. Went to see my beautiful words the next day…and they were gone.
The whole file was corrupted. Bye bye Secret of Folloman Finn. And because it was on a portable drive, for some reason, Word doesn’t make backup files. Nice. Very nice. I’ve downloaded about five different programs, all trying to ‘recover’ the latest edition of Folloman Finn…but with no luck.
So then I ran the chkdsk and scandisk programs. Chkdsk actually stopped and asked ‘found error is secret of folloman finn.doc’ Repair y/n?
What it was REALLY asking me was ‘do you want me to permanently wipe this file from your hard drive, winking it out of existence, snapping my fingers and erasing it forever, making it disappear as if God himself stepped down and formated your hard drive?
Hmmm, who knew?
So it’s gone forever.
Two saving graces. One, I backed up only 3 hours earlier (I could’ve lost days or weeks worth of work…that would’ve been depressing). Two, I actually posted some of those new words to my own site — which I can now pull back.
The unfortunate thing is that the lost words were the climax of Chapter 2 — Nathaniel (Troubleshooter extraordinaire) vs Vernon Archer (Crucifier extraordinaire).
Damn.
Remember, folks, always back up your work.