And here I found this humbling

So I was writing up some of my revised new introduction chapter and the unthinkable happened to me while I was off doing a lift test for a prospective job. The power went out.

Instantly I lost all of my progress made since last Friday (which admittedly wasn't that much in length). Now I have to re-write an entire playground scene and details and characterization however brief it was all over again and from scratch.

Moral of this story? Always force a hard save before leaving to do anything.

Oh, I find that so frustrating when it happens to me!

This is probably the main reason I like programs that auto-save. It makes situations like that a whole lot less traumatic.

Oh boy. I'm sorry, that totally sucks.

Get in the habit of saving every paragraph. It had saved my writing several times.

Your program doesn't have crash recovery?

It does (Word 2007) except the Auto Recover point was horribly outdated compared to what I had written just prior to the outage and leaving for the test.

Try to remember what you wrote before.

That sucks. Maybe you'll end up more satisfied with the rewritten product. For some reason, that seems to happen a lot with people.

^ Happens with me a lot. Then again, other times I never get quite into the feel of it again...

SHIT. This just happened to me. After months of just minor conversation additions, I came back to work to my rpg and my computer crashed, causing a great deal of files getting corrupted. And I was so stupid that I forgot to make a back up copy, so my most recent back up is 8 months old. And, due to shitty luck, pretty much everything I've done during all these months was among the files that got corrupted, because of their name. Only today's stuff got saved.

Yes, it's not that much of a work lost, but it sucks.

Oh, that reminds me.

-takes out jumpdrive to back-up story-

Glad to see it helped somebody.

Moral of the story: Always back up everything. Even if you write it on paper.

I lost everything on my computer but I had my story backed up from a few months before.

I didn't like what I'd written for the part I lost anyway because it had some unfortunate implications, so a new start for that part of the book was in order, I guess.

same things happened to me...

lost everything on my old pc and external harddrive, including everything i ever put down. biggest problem is just the names. so many names and i remember so few of them, and i felt they fit so well aswell. somewhat more jarring is that i uploaded 3 chapters of a particular story, which included full names of several characters, and took them down (for reasons i cant remember) about a week before i lost everything. and even more annoying is that the chart with all 170 or so names is something i sent to several friends for some help- turns out in a bizarre twist of fate, by the time i got a new pc and logged back into msn, turns out all of them had problems with their pc's which lead to the deletion of said file.

god just flipped me the middle finger.

the moral of this story? dont trust your friends to help you out in your time of need and only take down your work if you have something to replace it.

I've had this happen to me several times. I also had a friend in high school who would make fun of me saving constantly. He would say things like "oh your one of those people who save all the time". I always found this odd because of how terrible the school computers worked but he was never one to pass up a chance to try and ostracize someone.

Happened a few times to me. Although lately I've been having trouble with my movie scripts getting physcially lost, since they're usually written on notebook paper. Had to cut out a few scenes of Hard Rock since I couldn't find the pages I wrote them on. So, for my space opera, after finding the thing in the garage, I typed it all out on my laptop so I could print it out if I lose the notebook again.