Technology Hates Me

A year or so ago I talked about the perils of technology. And eerily, I posted that on November 22, 2016. This particular week in November must be my personal bad-luck week or something.

So, I’ve been working on a secret project for almost two years. The release date has been delayed so many times due to factors beyond my control. I finally finished the final edits on it last week. I was starting to get excited because I realized I could maybe swing a release before Christmas.

Last night, I also realized that I needed to make a few tweaks before sending it to the proofreader (first time hiring a proofreader; usually my editing is done in-house by one of our marvelous editors). This project is independent of TDP so yeah, I had to hire one. 🙂 Anyway, I was supposed to get it to her yesterday and thought I could do the tweaks and send it off.

I should really know better by now. Maybe my excitement has made me forget all the other times that technology screwed me over.

So, before I get into the story, you need to know the backstory. I am obsessive about backups. An incident in college where I lost an 8-page paper right before it was due because of a rogue Macintosh made me realize just how easy files can be sucked up into the ether with no hope of return. So, since then, I have made no less than four backups of any important file. I used to also back up to CD but since I have cloud storage, I stopped that. So, four locations. Remember this.

I tried to pull up my edited file. Nothing seemed amiss until I saw two things: there were no text boxes and there was a website address I remembered deleting. Okay, no biggie, maybe this one didn’t save. I have three more, right?

…Yeah. All three of them were missing my edits. ALL THREE. Now, I vividly remember saving them, as I always do. If i hadn’t, I would have gotten a pop up message about saving. Plus, I save every few minutes just in case.

But what I am scratching my head about is that ALL FOUR weren’t saved. The files were not in the unsaved documents or the temp files. It was as if they had just disappeared (and this happened again with a work file today. Luckily, I found that one).

So I resigned myself to editing those last ten pages again. However, the part that really sucked was that I’d made little tweaks throughout the book and there was no way I’d ever remember them.

I was gutted. So gutted that I seriously considered putting off the release and re-editing it completely. But then I remembered all of those setbacks and decided that I’d just do the best I could and release it before Christmas as planned.

I vented to a writer friend about this because it STILL blew my mind that my system had failed. My seemingly perfect system I’d used for DECADES. So, she told me to check OneDrive. I’d been sticking files in there as a sort of backup backup but never really gave it much thought. Did you know that OneDrive has a version history? And you can pull up previous saved copies of your files?

Mind. Blown.

She literally saved me HOURS of work and probably an ulcer. The file was there. I immediately saved it everywhere under a new name AND uploaded it to my Dropbox. I am never losing track of that file again.

So, Cathy, if you’re reading this, I owe you bigtime. 🙂

The secret project will be released—no, wait. I better not even put that out to the universe because then something ELSE will go wrong…another file will go poof and—

Yeah. Look for the cover reveal and announcement soon on my blog. Crossing fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes…knocking on wood, knocking on wood some more, and saying a prayer…

And HOPE nothing else goes wrong.