Last year, I was unfortunate enough to get the "blue screen of death" on my trust laptop. It was a very difficult time for me. I was petrified that I'd lost everything! Thankfully, I rushed my laptop to a local repair shop where my data was easily retrieved and loaded onto a brand new laptop. So, with the exception of the few hundred dollars I had to drop to get a new computer, all ended well. For a few months after that, I was very careful with my books. I would save them to the computer and then to a flash drive, just in case. Well, as you can guess, I got a little too comfortable with my new laptop. A false sense of security and a "surely that can't happen to me again" attitude convinced me to relax with the data backup.
A week or so ago, I got hit with a virus or some other awful thing. Unlike the last time, I wasn't worried because I figured my trusty computer repair shop could pull me out of the continuous windows startup repair loop that I was stuck in. More than a week later, I finally got my computer back and guess what...
I LOST SOME OF MY FILES!
AHHHHHH!!!!!!!
It's not that huge of a deal. I have most of the files for the books that I've already published. Of course, I lost two books that I'd started and not finished (including the one that I had abandoned a few months ago). Surprisingly, that doesn't upset me as much as you'd think. What really upsets me is the fact that I can't seem to open the file for one of my published books. I don't know what it bothers me, because that book is already published to KDP and is selling quite well. I suppose it bothers me because I somehow feel like I can't prove it's mine because I don't have the original document. That's ridiculous, right? No one will doubt my intellectual property rights based on the fact that I have a scrambled document, right? It just leaves me uncomfortable, I guess.
One thing I have learned from this is that I need to invest in some sort of file backup system that doesn't rely on me to remember to do it.
I hope that something like this never happens to anyone reading this. I also hope that this inspires you to do a quick backup of everything that is important to you on your computer!
All I can say is that it pays to be persistent! I simply would not let it rest. I've spent all afternoon searching my computer and guess what...I found all my book files! Woohoo! The only one that I wasn't able to recover is the project that I abandoned (perhaps that's a sign!) but everything else is saved and I am so very happy! :-)
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