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On Saturday my sister and I went to an SCA event, a Coronation. It was splendid and awesome and glorious and colourful and everything. As is my custom with SCA events, I was going to write it down afterwards.
Today I’ve written 3,000 words already, and was looking fair to finish by tonight (which is good, with Good Friday tomorrow).
Then I accidentally hit some keys I wasn’t intending to, and ended up doing something weird and accidentally closing the tab.I lost all my work from today. I lost good words. I lost feelings put into words that I’ve been trying to do justice to all week. I lost some, honestly, really good passages. I lost them all.
I was able to recover most of the story, up through what I wrote last night. But all my work from today, gone forever.
My first thought (after trying not to get sick) was to call my dad at work, because he does computer stuff for a living. He wasn’t able to come up with anything. Apparently closing the tab ruined my chances.
So I had a good cry, in a semi-public place. And now I think I’m going to cry again. And maybe again. (And by the way, crying isn’t a thing I do a lot of.) And I just might miss a class because I won’t be presentable in time. I’m still trying to control my stomach, which is not helping matters. I’ve lost work before, but never on such a tight deadline, never stuff that I thought was really good while I was writing it this way, never on such a scale, and never in a public place.
I think I’m going to try to reconstruct the really important parts (there were three-ish of them) and put in a note that parts of the manuscript were tragically lost, and therefore there are sad gaps in the manuscript, like mouths opened in cries of lamentation (maybe not that phrase, but that’s how it feels), and go on with it. I kind of need to finish today. I won’t remember things in the necessary detail over this weekend. I may miss class just for trying to catch up. Right now I want to wake up, or cry — I can’t decide which.
The thing is, I was working in Google Drive, which saves your work as you do it. I’d have only needed to click the “undo” button (a Godsend in itself) to restore all my work, and it would only be enough to make me sigh with relief at another disaster narrowly averted, but averted none the less. Except whatever I did closed the tab as well, so that ceased to be an option.
Am I overreacting? Is this normal? Sympathy? I need more time, if I’m going to do this.
>>> exit, pursued by a bear.
You will draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation. (Isaiah 12:3)
Oh no! That is so awful! I hope you feel better, and what you write next is even better than before!
I work on Google Drive too. Did you try the revision history? It is under the file tab, under “see revision history” It keeps track of what you have written over time, and you can go back to copies of work that you have written and since changed. I hope this helps!
@northerner (I forgot to tag you on my reply)
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@northerner Oh No! That’s so horrible! :(::::: I’m so sorry.
@Northerner Agh, that’s terrible!! I am so sorry. I can’t relate on such a large level because I’m not a writer, but I’ve accidentally lost portions of long emails before (long), and I know the feeling of utter hopelessness about being able to redo it all just as you had it.
I’m really, really sorry. I hope you’re able to reconstruct it again relatively easily, and I know this won’t help but…*hugs you* *gives you tissues too*P.S. Try not to let that pursuing bear catch you.
@northerner I almost want to cry too, which isn’t normal, so I think you’re fine. I hope you get good inspiration.
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@Northerner Ugh, that’s horrible. 🙁 You’re definitely not overreacting; my computer once crashed on me and I thought I’d lost my entire book (which wasn’t backed up, for some reason), so I certainly sympathize. Gosh, I feel so bad for you. Hopefully rewriting it won’t be too depressing.
INTJ ➸Your friendly neighborhood mastermind. ➸https://thesarcasticelf.wordpress.com/
@northerner I’ve done this too and I feel your pain. *pats you on back* I don’t know if this will work, but in Chrome, you can go to history, and it has all the tabs that you’ve opened for several days. I think you *might* be able to retrieve deleted google docs from there… (Other browsers also has a history thing that might work.) If not… *hands you lots of tissues*
@Northerner this almost happened to me several times. Mostly because I type so fast and I accidentally hit ctrl. a (which highlights all) instead of ctrl. s (which saves) and kept going before the command processed and ended up replacing my entire document (800 pages, 500,000 words, and two years’ worth of work) with those few words I’d typed… I know the feeling. It’s bad. My stomach hurts for you. I know my telling you it will be okay won’t do anything to help you because saying that is so empty when it won’t, so I guess I’ll just say you’re not alone. The deadline doesn’t help, I’m sure. *hugs you*
@PrincessFoo, that was one of the first things I thought to check. . . no luck. It had everything up until the place I stopped at the night before, but nothing from that day. Which did mean I only lost 3,000 words instead of 15,000, but still.
@Emma-Flournoy, I have so far managed to evade the bear. He may be catching up, though, as I discovered I have yet another final project to take care of.
@Daeus, you’re ENFJ, aren’t you? That might explain it. hands you raspberries. My sister says food makes everything better.
@Ethryndal, it’s good to know this reaction is typical. Most people I know would find it silly that I cried over losing words.
@Jess, that was one of the first things I thought of too, but for some reason all that showed up was the document as it stood at the time I searched, not the time it had saved it in the history, if that makes any sense. Which isn’t how it’s supposed to be, but how it ended up being.
@Kate-Flournoy, the ctrl+a thing is what we think I did. I was starting to type a name that starts with A, but in my haste hit control, which is right under shift, and then the next letter I typed was what it replaced everything with. But it wasn’t nearly two years’ worth of work! Yikes! That puts my loss in perspective.
@Everyone, thank you for your sympathy and offers of tissues. I did actually run out of real ones at one point and have to go all the way across that floor of the library to get more from a bathroom. In retrospect I must have been a funny sight: I was wearing a green scarf, my eyes were red, and my lips were purple (they always turn that colour when I cry, for some reason). I probably looked like a very badly made-up clown.I did manage to rewrite the two most important bits that I lost, and then I went on and managed to finish the story, though since I’d lost so much time I stayed up late to do so. There is now a note in the text, taking the place of the part I lost, that says “Portions of this manuscript are missing” in approved form for similar lost pages (usually through fire or flood, though, which is probably more disastrous) in medieval books.
You will draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation. (Isaiah 12:3)
@northerner *eats raspberries* Thanks. 🙂
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@northerner I am so sorry! *hands you ice cream* Food really does make everything better.
Been there, done that, except it was an application instead of story words. Story words is worse!
May you get lots of inspiration to make up for that!The Scattered Writer
@Northerner *chains the bear up* ‘e won’t get out for some time yet. Now go forth and conquer.
(Btw, @Kate-Flournoy just almost lost that stuff, but we were able to fix it in time. After great stomachache. Otherwise…*coughcough* her computer might have suffered great damage from a certain being.)Oh, no! I completely understand how you feel @Northerner I do stuff like this all the time with school assignments, which, I can promise you, are just as aggravatingly heartbreaking to redo.
I know that the hardest part about redoing assignments can be doing them for the second time, but it sounds like what you were writing is definitely worth it. Push forward!
Writer. Dreamer. Sometimes blogger. MBTI mess. Lover of Jesus and books.
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