GAH!

That's pretty much what I said about twenty minutes ago. Only it was louder and a lot angrier.

As you may or may not know, I've been on the world's biggest writing tear as of late. I'm doing my damnedest to write what looks to be a novel (which is why I've been slacking in the blog department... gotta work on that...) and it's been coming along pretty decently. So twenty minutes ago I opened up my file on Alexa, preparing for another fruitful day of writing.

That's when I noticed that the word count was off by nearly 2,500 words. Oh and seven pages had simply vanished.

What. The. FUCK?!

Where the hell did my work go?! Sure, it doesn't seem like a whole helluva lot, but it's a shit-ton of blood, sweat and tears for me. And here it had simply disappeared into the freaking ether or something. About a third of a chapter was gone, along with a bunch of edits I had made to some of my previous stuff. It wasn't there. It was as if I had closed the file without saving any changes at all. And yes, that is completely impossible because I hit CTRL+S about three times before I closed the file late yesterday. I always make sure I save my stuff. Always.

Yeah, I kinda wanted to cry at that point. And trudge back upstairs to get my notebook so I could re-transcribe everything I had written yesterday. Not an awesome prospect, I tell ya.

That's when I remembered that I had always backed up my file on a 40 gig drive that Prime had purchased from a coworker a couple of months ago. Earlier this month, I told him I didn't exactly want just one lone copy of what I was working on; bad things could happen and if the file was accidentally deleted, I'd be in a shitload of trouble. So he suggested I save a back up on the 40 gig. It sounded like a good idea, so I did. So I opened up the external drive and prayed that the same thing hadn't happened to my secondary file.

The back up was fine. Everything was there. So that external hard drive just paid for itself by saving my sorry ass. (Thank you, Prime. I seriously owe you for this!)

So what did we learn, class? "Always back your shit up!" Very good! Trust me, it's a lesson I ain't gonna forget.

--Weasel, "Now if my damned heart rate would come the hell down and my hands would quit shaking, I'd be fine...!"