A Writer's Horror Story

I’ve felt so smug for the past six months. When my not-so-old laptop blew it mother board at the beginning of NaMo last year, I lost a great deal of my work in progress. I went through the painful process of buying a new desktop and worried through all the problems fraught with setting it up.

Getting all the programs installed in English instead of Italian took a lot of time. I can use the Italian, but it’s easier in English, and I want easy. I’m a touch typist so configuring Italian keyboard, which has symbols in different places, became the next order of business. What you see on my keyboard now is NOT what you get. Oh, sometimes I have to remind myself where a certain key is because, if I think about it, my brain shuts down. If I trust my fingers, they will find it.

I worried most about all the data I had lost. So I contracted with SOS Online Backup. It has been comforting to see that little backup icon churning away every morning. During the few weeks that I was offline, I agonized over the possibility that I might have a breakdown and lose data. I put stuff on a thumb drive every day, and the moment I got connected I logged in to SOS Backup and ran a full recovery.

This morning, disaster struck. My smug heart fell when I opened the file for today's blog in preparation for posting it and found the snippet for a future post in its place. I’m not sure how it happened, but I had overwritten this week’s blog post. Aghhh!

Not to worry. I have SOS Online Backup. But I couldn’t find any saved files. I fiddled with the account. I contacted online support. Still no files. Finally, the techie called me. It seems that my account had been set up to backup my C drive, something that I thought strange at the time, so only program files have been backed up for the past six months. No documents!! So the lovely blog that I had planned to post today has been lost. I’ll rewrite it another day.

This day will be devoted to trying to get things backed up properly. No writing for me today. If you have any lost document horror stories, I hope you will share them in the comments section.