Tragedy - fan fiction writers will sympathize

[sidney]

My computer is dead. My cat spilled water, and even though it was just a tiny bit of water, it shorted out my computer and pretty much fried the hard drive somehow.
I backup my computer occasionally. So I have versions of my stories (Now more than 30 books) from March. But March - August, I had made revisions and added many scenes. They're gone. All the changes I made during that six month period is gone. Including a whole new origin arc. I'm so sad. I haven't written since October now because I'm just so sad that I lost that stuff.

I paid $50 for a computer place to access my hard drive and get me copies of everything. They could find everything in my download folder, but they can't locate anything in a documents folder. My story was in the documents folder. They say it's just an empty folder!

I'm hopeful there's some way I can still find these versions of my story.

But it's pretty heart-breaking.

[HoudiniDerek]

Sidney,

I'm sorry to hear that!

I had that happen with me years ago in graduate school. So after I had to rewrite my thesis overnight, I invested in several flash drives and I back-up obsessively.

Hopefully you will be able to remember or maybe find them embedded somewhere in the copies. I have seen that happen where the files get consolidated. Good luck!

[amyk]

Sorry to hear that Sidney! Maybe you will be able to get excited again down the road about writing, and maybe you can try to recapture what you lost or even make it better. I would be sad if I lost my fanfiction stuff that I've written and saved on my computer, too.

[sidney]

It's happened before to a smaller scale, and I know I still have 99% of it. Each book is really, really long and how I work is as I reread it, I add to it, so my revisions happen throughout it all at the same time. It really is impossible to remember all of the things I added.
I have so much of it memorized word for word now - the stuff I've read over and over for the last twenty years, but sometimes when I read it, I even surprise myself. I'm like... Wow. I wrote that? That's so good. That must have been during my last revision. I won't even remember doing it!
The story arcs that I lost weren't done, they were just beginning, and I was very excited about them. I was giving Murdock a boxing backstory, actually. And in another book I was finally explaining the backstory I had for why Face joined the army and what happened - he had unknowingly had an affair with a mobster's girl and he was running.

I think the main reason why I'm not writing right now, and this is really the first time in about fifteen years that I haven't been writing it, is because I'm still hopeful I can retrieve the files somehow. I don't want to write in old saves if the newer versions can be saved. It's not that I've lost the desire (I'm always thinking of new scenes).

[sidney]

Do any of you have an idea where they can be?

I had a HP laptop. I was saving in documents. But the documents folder is empty. The computer guy says that if he could retrieve one folder from the hard drive, he SHOULD be able to retrieve it all. It's very unusual. He asked if I was saving to the cloud. I don't think I was. I don't have the cloud attached to my laptop.

[HoudiniDerek]

Dec 4, 2020 6:41:53 GMT -5 sidney said:

Do any of you have an idea where they can be?

I had a HP laptop. I was saving in documents. But the documents folder is empty. The computer guy says that if he could retrieve one folder from the hard drive, he SHOULD be able to retrieve it all. It's very unusual. He asked if I was saving to the cloud. I don't think I was. I don't have the cloud attached to my laptop.

When it happened to mine a number of years ago, the Documents folder got put into operating system or something weird like that. Since Documents is an "always" folder on a computer, it got consolidated into a place with other necessary files. I don't know if you can do a keyword search throughout the computer or not, but it might be worth a try.

Or find the time to go through every folder one at a time and look.

Worst case, did he pull off the Recycling Bin? My sister had a bunch of Documents end up there one time.

Good luck!

[Eclipse139]

Oh no, Sidney. I hope you're able to recover your work. It's a bit odd that your documents folder is empty though, those docs must be somewhere?

I should definitely back mine up more often, I tend to do it probably once a year. Most of the stories I've written are posted on fan fiction websites so I could recover them from there if I ever needed to. I don't back up things I'm in the middle of writing though and having to start all over again would be really frustrating.

[sidney]

I have the start of the boxing story!
The last back up must have been in June.
So it's just June - August that is missing, so I guess it's not as bad as I thought. I was somewhat responsible with my backups. I'm actually surprised at how practical I was.

Still the Face stuff is completely gone. That was the last thing I was working on when Snowball decided to tip over that cup. And of course all the little edits and revisions as I reread.

Something funny? I was so upset about possibly losing the boxing storyline, but tonight I just massively overhauled it. I moved it in the book and changed some context.
Wah wah! I lost it. Oh, I didn't lose it. Let me completely change it.

[amyk]

I was watching 20/20 last night, and the police were able to recover all this stuff that some murderess believed she had deleted - not sure if that was from her phone or computer (I think phone maybe).....but if they can recover stuff that bad guys think they have deleted, I would think that someone should be able to recover the files that you did not delete....but don't ask me how. BA Baracus could probably help you. I bet he would have learned new technology throughout the years, since he seemed to like to dabble in that stuff (like with the little recording bugs). I bet he would have become the team's IT genius with the rise in technology and personal computers!

[sidney]

I still have the computer. I won't get rid of it. I'm hopeful that someone can retrieve the files for me at some point. There's pictures and stuff on it, too, that they couldn't get. All they could get were my downloads. It just goes to show you that you have to backup your backup even.

It was just a tiny bit of water but my laptop was plugged in on the table. It sat in the water all night. I noticed it in the morning. I bought a big bag of rice, just in case that old wives tale worked, but it was fried already. It shorted out.

It was my cup of water, too. Do you know how many times I've told the kids not to eat or drink around their devices? And I left the cup of water there. I could have sworn I drank it all but I guess I didn't. When I went to my laptop in the morning, I could feel the water underneath it and saw the cup on its side.

[Deleted]

I'm so sorry to hear that, Sidney. I hope you'll be able to get your stories back, I know how hard you've worked on them through the years.

[zania]

I'm so sorry to hear about this! A really good computer tech can find a way to recover all of the files on the hard drive, even if they have to basically mirror your current hard drive onto another one to do so.

I actually keep my fanfic on a flash drive so I can take it with me. If my computer ever goes, I know that I'll still have everything from the fic since it's not on the actual computer hard drive. Google Docs/Google Drive is also a good alternative for storing things since it's free and tied into a Gmail account, plus you can access that from any browser.

[Morgan]

Sidney, just read about your mishap... It's terrible! Did you manage to find someone to retrieve your fic?
I can't relate because I never lost anything that important, but I once crashed 2 external hard drives with 2To of data. Lucky for me, nothing of real value, just several years of collecting movies and series...
Hope you get get your fic back soon! ;-)

[sidney]

There are some scenes that I think are going to be lost forever and that makes me so sad. I can remember some, which is good. But there was this really great scene in Hawaii after the POW camp that was so angsty and powerful... And it's gone. <<insert sad face here>>