Can we talk about the one time I lost a whole novel chapter to a formatting glitch

I was at a coffee shop downtown last Saturday, typing away on a short story I'd been working on for weeks. About 30 minutes in, my word processor suddenly froze and then crashed, and I realized I hadn't saved since I opened the file. I tried reopening it, and the file came back totally blank all my edits were gone. I panicked for a solid 5 minutes, then remembered Google Docs keeps version history if you enable autosave, which I had by accident. It took me 20 minutes to dig through the history and recover the chapter, but I got it back. Has anyone else run into a similar software issue that almost killed their project?

4 comments

4 Comments

william_craig73d ago

Oh man, that hit way too close to home. Lost a whole essay in college to a power outage. Had this perfect analysis of a short story. All gone. Just a blank screen staring back at me. Almost threw my laptop out the window. Google Docs saved me too but I didn't trust it for weeks after that. Kept hitting save manually every five minutes like a nervous tic.

karen_hill33d ago

Caught myself and had to reread that - you had autosave on by accident? That's like finding money in a coat pocket you forgot about.

blair_torres703d ago

Kept hitting the save button like I was playing Whack-a-Mole after that happened to me once too. @karen_hill3, that autosave was a lifesaver for sure, now I panic if I don't see that little cloud icon flashing.

joseph_green133d ago

What really helped me after that was setting up version history... then if something weird happens I can always go back to an earlier save. I actually name my versions sometimes if I'm about to make big changes. That way even if the autosave fails or I delete something by accident, I've got a fallback. It's not perfect but it beats staring at a blank screen.