Woe is me

You know, usually when adding a lot of new words to a manuscript, I save the document to a flash drive every time I’m going to close the file, and I change flash drives every couple of days. And nothing ever goes wrong.

When revising, I’m more casual; I save every couple of days or any time I make substantial changes (like adding a new scene, say). I don’t bother saving so often if I’m just doing a line-by-line cut or something relatively trivial. In that case I may not save the document to a flash drive for a day or so because it would just not be that much trouble to redo the work. And I may not switch flash drives as often either. Toward the end of the week I’ll toss the one I’ve been using in the basket where such things go and pick up a different one.

Well, I bet you can see this coming, can’t you?

I really got into the current revision last Sunday (the 4th). And yesterday, after I wrote a new scene, I saved the file. Which turned out, when I went to re-open it, to be corrupted.

If I hadn’t saved the file, I’d have been fine. But the file I saved was … yes … the corrupted file.

I tried to use a text recovery program just now. And if all I cared about was recovering the file, success! But I lost practically all the paragraph formatting. It’s just hopeless trying to use that.

I’m guessing it would take more hours trying to get the file fixed somehow than it will just to start over. Especially since I spent half an hour last night taking quick notes on what I’d done. I’m guessing three, four days. Work days, so maybe a few more, unless we get dreadful weather that prevents me from taking the dogs out (that always speeds up writing).

Anyway: ugh. So aggravating.

And I guess maybe I’ll start changing flash drives every. single. day.

Update: My computer-genius brother excised the corrupted portion of the file, which was most of it — but he did recover the first 75 pages. Which is 75 pages I don’t have to go back through and will surely save at least a day. So yay!