What Do You Do At That "Oh Shit" Moment?

I wrote a chapter and a half of my story today, walked away for five minutes to get a soda and when I came back my computer had died from low battery. (It normally warns me when it gets to 13% but it didn't see fit to do that this time...). I keep so many documents open at once that Auto-Recover didn't save any of the work I did and now I am seriously close to tears with the thought of re-writing it all (it was seriously some of the best writing I have done in forever).

Any advice?

Don't leave your laptop unpluged anymore.

>.>

That would be good advice if my charger didn't suck. (I never take my battery out anymore for fear of the cord twisting the wrong way and shutting off, and since it's really bad to leave it hooked up while the battery is full...)

edited 23rd Jan '12 9:39:33 PM by LMage

Save more regularly. :/

Get in the habit of keeping an eye on the battery. You probably use Windows (I have a school-issued MacBook that's about three years old), but I'm not sure where the battery icon is located on a Windows interface, so...

edited 23rd Jan '12 9:38:44 PM by CrystalGlacia

Always save everything. Ctrl-S is more or less like blinking to me. (Well, C-x C-s, but that still works in word processors, just make sure nothing's selected.)

Also, don't forget to make backup copies of your stuff. Flash drives cost next to nothing these days.

Save, save, save. I once lost part of my writing owing to a thunderstorm induced power outage.

After dealing with feeling like an idiot/being close to tears, I set to writing again, and I write down whatever I can remember of what I want to rewrite (if it's like a chapter and a half — in my case, it was my entire body of work, which I still haven't rewritten. And my backup of it failed, due to being on an old flashdrive... >_>) Because I'm so frigging prone to losing things, I back my work up online (and on my school server as well as a flashdrive); I find Google Docs to be particularly useful.

I know what you're feeling, Mage. And it sucks. But — can you remember exactly what you wrote, even just phrases, sentences, or a paragraph? If the answer is yes, for the love of Chtulu, man, write it down! I find that doing that, when I've lost something, helps me remember it. And often, my rewriting of whatever it was is better than the first time.

For me, Ctrl+S is like breathing - I do it without thinking about it most of the time. It's in my muscle memory at this point, which is kind of funny when I do it automatically on things like webpages where I want to save something, and I wonder why the file format isn't .doc.

edited 24th Jan '12 4:22:11 AM by punkreader

I just don't write if I'm in danger of losing power. My computer has the charger cable plugged in 24/7, and when it's not, usually I can tell. It's best to be cautious whenever you're doing something important.

edited 24th Jan '12 4:24:50 AM by Collen

I once lost a colouring when my computer suddenly crashed. Ever since, I save everything all the time, every few minutes. I don't even think about it, I just do it automatically while thinking about what to write/draw/colour next.

There was a time I couldn't login in my own computer. Another time, I was travelling and writing and all the files in my flash drive suddenly became corrupted.

I panicked.

Also, incidentally, I do all my writing on a desktop and have it plugged into a big-ass UPS. But that's not really pertinent here.

At one point I was doing a lot of writing on school lab computers and storing it to a flash drive, which then got stolen. Annoying. None of it was much better than crap anyway, in retrospect, but...yeah.

Actually, that is pertinent here. I was just about to recommend that Mage get a desktop and do all his writing on a permanently plugged-in computer from now on... I've found that laptops not only act screwier from a pure technology-is-batshit-insane standpoint, but also are thief-bait and have electronic security risks that non-portable devices don't. Also, writing in the same place every time you write is good (for most people, anyway). There's a reason that Paul Sheldon always rented the same hotel room in the same Colorado inn (yes, I know he's not a real person, but there's also a reason Stephen King wrote him that way, and who the fuck are we to argue with Stephen King?). Having a laptop means you're probably going to write in different locations at least some of the time, and the quality of your stuff is going to vary pretty wildly under those conditions.

Other recommendations:

• Save often, which has already been covered but does bear reiterating.
• Never even turn on the computer if the weather isn't clear. Power outages due to thunderstorms were also mentioned once already, but I know from experience that a light drizzle can turn into hurricane conditions in less than a minute sometimes, so don't think you're okay to write if it's just barely raining. Also, if you live in Florida or Virginia (or possibly other places in the Southeast that I haven't personally visited), be aware that it rains while the sun is still shining brightly all the fracking time around that geographical area.

Back up regularly.

I lost almost all my work (10 years on and off) thanks to being an idiot. And, my backups were both corrupted and incomplete. I was numb inside for a few days, but then shrugged. These things happen, and hey! I've had worse things happen.

At least this way, nobody will ever see some of my early disasters.

I just told myself, 'it's words - there're more where they came from'.

EDIT: what actually got me more than the loss of the research or the actual stories themselves was the loss of some of my old Role Play scripts. Those memories are now stuck only in my head.

edited 26th Jan '12 1:40:05 PM by Euodiachloris

Ultamietly what I would like to do is buy a and use a desktop for my personal wirting and other things, and have my laptop be only for school. But thats just not in the cards right now financialy.

I try to keep backups of my files on a flash drive, and so far it's worked out for me — except for that one time when I forgot it was in the pocket of some pants that were in the process of being washed. (Fortunately, after some frantic blow-drying it still worked, with all the files intact.)

Barring that, you could entrust your file copies to a confidant, assuming that you trust someone enough to hold onto them. Seems like a good way to fight the odds, I suppose.

Barring that, you could just offer a small animal in sacrifice to the god of technology. Though why a digital deity would want the flesh of a creature is beyond me...

I have an old printer I can put to the alter. Bet that'd work instead of a pigeon...

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but Google Docs saves on its own periodically. So, along with being all around very awesome and helpful, it also makes sure you don't lose everything due to a random mishap.

I email myself AOL > Gmail. My Gmail forwards everything to my AOL anyway, so I end up with two copies on the net.