Writing Update: My Hard Drive Died

I had my worst writer’s nightmare come true in November: I lost all my work from the past 6 months.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve feared losing my documents. I’m one of those people who hits CTRL+S every 20 seconds, just to be safe. I even have an external hard drive where I keep everything, on the off chance my computer dies. I have concerns about saving my documents on clouds like Google Drive, despite the convenience of it, but I also don’t want to bog down my computer with literally hundreds/thousands of iterations of all these documents. Plus, it’s convenient to be able to grab my external hard drive and have all my work with me, no matter where I am. I’ve been pretty diligent with saving all my most recent work onto that drive, so even when I don’t save to my computer, I know it’s safely stored in that little black box.

I let one crucial habit fall to the side these past several months, and that’s where I went horribly wrong. I hadn’t been backing up my internal drive with the most recent iterations of my manuscripts and other projects for some time. I think subconsciously I determined I was being ridiculous, and the odds of actually losing things were so slim, I didn’t need to keep up with my weekly back up.

I will never make that mistake again.

I was horrified when I heard the strange alarm-like sound (something between a grind and a beep) coming from my external hard drive a few weeks ago. I obviously knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t until it failed to launch at all that I realized just how bad it was. I looked back through my computer, and nothing from the past 6 months was saved onto the internal drive. I’d only been saving to the external one, and now it was buzzing at me angrily, refusing to hand over any of my work. Like any good writer, I panicked.

First, I thought it was just a faulty connection with my laptop. I normally work on my desktop when I’m doing actual drafting and editing, so I crossed my fingers and hoped it’d work on my desktop. It did not. Undeterred (and fully in denial still), I tried on multiple other devices. It still didn’t work. So, I eventually had to accept the fact that I’d probably have to take it in to have them transfer the files over onto my other external hard drive. I thought that’d be maybe $200 and a few hours; I’d drop it off, go grab lunch or something with my mom while I waited, and then return to my fully functional drive ready to go by dinnertime.

Apparently, it’s not as simple as that, and I was shocked to discover just how expensive the data recovery process is! Not only did I have to take it in—thank you Data Doctors (truly, I’m so grateful to them)—but I had to send it away for over a week, with no guarantee they’d even be able to get everything pulled off and copied over. If they could do it, I’d be looking at an $1100 invoice. When I first saw the quoted amount, I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do. I’m a single mom and I’m disabled. I do not have a ton of expendable income. And $1100 right at Christmas time, the same week I learned I have to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for one of my monthly meds, was quite possibly the worst timing.

I had early copies of a lot of the projects on my internal drive or in emails to beta readers, editors, or critique partners, so not all was lost. Sure, every bit of revision I’d done in the past half a year was gone, but I could do it again if I really needed to. It’d be a lot, and I was NOT looking forward to it, but technically, it could be done. What pushed me toward going forward with the data recovery, however, was the projects for which there was no back up whatsoever. Two novel manuscripts I’ve written this back half of the year, and a poetry collection I wrote while I was going through my divorce. The latter was surprisingly more devastating a loss to consider than the two full novel manuscripts even though I have no intention of ever publishing that poetry. I’d written them during a really important time in my life, and there would be no replicating that. No conjuring the raw emotion from that season now that I’ve been in a more healed place for years.

Losing my recent revisions and those 2 manuscripts would have been a hard loss, for sure. But I might have been willing to let them go if it meant saving that $1100 I didn’t have. But when I imagined those dozens of poems, I couldn’t do it. So, I sucked it up and sent the drive off. It arrived back at my local store yesterday, and my babies are back home with me now, safe and sound. Worth every penny.

I’m so incredibly grateful they were able to recover almost everything on the drive, and I didn’t lose a single essential file. That said, I have absolutely no desire to go through this experience again, so, by the end of the year, I’ll have my own NAS storage set up. It’ll have multiple drives backing up my work, and will also have my own cloud storage. I’ve been wanting to do something more for some time, but honestly just never felt like it was pressing enough to do the research and get it purchased/set up. I also didn’t realize there are actually systems now where we can have our own personal cloud! My brother recommended it, and I’m so glad he did, because it’s exactly what I want. This way, I’ll have the security of knowing my data is safe (and SAVED), and I’ll be able to access my work from anywhere without having to carry around the hard drive.

Aside from my newfound knowledge about all things storage, there’s been another beautiful side effect to these weeks of uncertainty: My creativity is flowing more than ever! With my files inaccessible, I decided to take the time off from writing. I needed to regroup and refocus after facing the reality that all my work might be gone. I didn’t have it in me to start a whole new project while I waited, so I resolved myself to spending the time with family and resting. As a result, ideas have been flooding in! So much so that, even though I’d planned to wait to write anything until I knew for sure what was going on with my files, I found myself fully outlining a new novel and brainstorming another. And they’re good, if I do say so myself.

So, as we go into December, I’m eager to see what comes from this apparently much-needed reset. And I want to remind everyone out there… Make sure your work is backed up!