A few weeks ago I noticed a bright spot in the corner of my iPad screen. Since it wasn’t in the viewing field really, I just kind of ignored it at the time. But then a week or so later I noticed another one that was close to the center of the screen and then a few days later a third one appeared. So I finally decided to send it off for repair since it’s still under warranty. (Glad I got the extended warranty) In preparation for sending it off I backed everything up to the cloud, to iTunes, and to my computer. I wanted to be sure I didn’t lose anything. 

While I was without my iPad I worked a bit on my desktop. I edited the short story that will be exclusive to my Patreon subscribers. And I added in some details to the prequel novella. That was in addition to writing five new chapters and editing four or five others.

Fast forward to last week when my new iPad arrived. So I get the new iPad and I turn it on and let it load everything. After several hours everything was uploaded and looked fine. All of my pictures and apps were there. My documents were stored in the cloud so they were there as well.

Or so I thought.

Then I started writing and I needed to look up a detail I’d changed in the novella but I couldn’t remember what I’d decided on since there’d been a few options. So I open the file for the novella and immediately start to freak out because none of the changes I’d made were there. I open the short story and all of those changes are gone as well. Scroll to the last chapter and, yep, the chapters that should have been there were gone. I’ve tried everything to get them back but their just gone. For some reason when I brought the new iPad online it overwrote the newest versions of the files with the version from when I’d backed up my iPad.

While it’s several hours of work… gone. It’s not the end of the world and it’s why I constantly backup my backups. I typically do it once a week but I’m going to have to get in the habit of doing it more often.

On my iPad I have iCloud storage and Dropbox, both. I have my writing program automatically linked to my iCloud account, but at the end of each week I duplicate the files and move them to my Dropbox so that I always have the most recent version there. I also backup my cloud accounts onto an external hard drive and regularly back up to a portable hard drive and thumb drives as well. The portable hard drive and thumb drives live in my fireproof safe.

Some might think that’s overkill but I’ve lost books in the past due to computer malfunction. That time I lost a six book series I was getting ready to start submitting to agents, back when I wanted to go the traditional route. I also lost four other standalone books and about half a dozen partials. I took it to the computer repair store hoping they could recover something but there was nothing they could do since the hard drive had gone out and corrupted everything on it.

Tears might have been involved.

Which is why I backup my backups now. The odds of all of them being corrupted or lost is minimal and while I might lose some work at least I’m not likely to lose entire books again.

So this week I’ve been trying to recreate as much of the changes and story as I can. It’s not going to be the same no matter what I do but hopefully it will end up being better. My head is so full of details it’s hard to keep things straight at times. Especially since I have a tendency to change my mind about things or I’ll get to a point and realize something isn’t working, so then I go back and rewrite sections to make it work.

I’ve already removed a character that was in all three of the current stories. They weren’t really necessary and I realized about two thirds of the way through this book that the character was pulling to much attention from the main characters and the overall story arc. They may appear in later books or they may end up in a different series altogether. Who knows.

Such is the writing life.