gone, but not forgotten

This is why I back everything up to an external harddrive, to One Drive, and to Dropbox. Lost a couple of chapters once. Not letting that happen again. Hope you're able to recover it.

Bobbie

If you're on Windows 10, try going to "Backup and Restore". It could very well have backed up your latest works, but you have to tell it to retrieve them by doing a "restore". I think there is an option to restore to somewhere else other than the original location. That way you don't overwrite your newer stuff.

Using Windows 10, you can set up a task in the task manager to do an immediate backup whenever you insert an external USB drive.

I have my Linux machine set to do an incremental backup every 4 hours to an internal 2Tb drive.

Bill

Hope you're able to get things back!  I know the feeling as a couple of years ago, my computer died. Fortunately, everything was backed up except my WIP at the time but I was able to retrieve the chapters from TNBW. Now, I back up on a regular basis and keep my current WIP on two computers (desktop and laptop).

Fingers crossed for you!

That happened to me once with a chapter. Ended up rewriting the whole chapter and liked the results better. I do have my first novel only in print. Didn't back it up. Now, it just sits in my attic as I'm not going to rewrite it on the computer. I backed up my Ph.D. thesis at Kinko's.

I guess what I'm saying is bummer, but make the lemonade. Use this as a way of making your work better. And next time, back up per all those other suggestions.

J P,

I'm so sorry. There is nothing I hate more than trying to recreate something I have already written once and then lost. It feels like scraping your brain with rusty metal. I save to three different hard drives, and also email my stuff to myself all the time. And I still lose stuff and have to re-write things. At least you have it stored here. Sorry for your bad luck.

Dae D. Shields

It's still in there. Lightning fried my computer a while back and I took it to a specialist and they retrieved everything. Don't know if it would be worth it if you can already recreate it, but just in case,  it is salvageable if it comes to that. Take care. Vern

Hey JP, sorry to hear you're going through this. Similar happened to me years ago when the hard drive in my writing computer died unexpectedly. Like vern, I was able to get most of it recovered by paying a technician to do it.

That experience taught me the value of buying a small external hard drive that I used only for back ups of my writing files. I DID NOT leave it connected to my computer and only took it out once a week to perform back ups. To preserve day to day edits, I used a simple thumb drive which I would erase each week after a successful back up to the bigger external drive. 

It's a laborious thing, but is the only safety net that's virtually fool proof. And thanks to the fire proof safe I bought, even if my home goes down in flames, my writing won't because that's where I store my external.

Edited to add: the reason I stopped keeping my external connected to the computer was I ALSO had an external hard drive go bad once too from keeping it connected and 'on' all the time. They also don't handle power surges well either.  Safest bet, connect--back up files--disconnect and store. Personally, not a fan of cloud services for storing writing. None of those services are guaranteed to be there forever.