The Quicksilver Workaholic

A friend used to have as the title of his blog, "Don't let your mind wander..." I really should pay attention to that bit of advice.

Last night kateslover had a meeting, and I'd thought about going out to sketch, but I was deep into working on the book. I just kept on--three illustrations and two small samples just yesterday. Hooray, PROGRESS.

I hadn't made as much of that as I wanted to, what with being sick, having a fever, and running around more than I usually do, but it felt GOOD making progress again, now that I'm much better.

So last night I also had the manuscript up in WordPerfect, doing a bit of editing and caption-writing and organizing at the same time, which I've been doing right along whenever I was at the computer. I deleted three or four illustrations from the original, replaced them with new work, and deleted the text that described the the discarded pieces. I hate wasted effort, so I pasted that text into a separate document in case I wanted to use it for something else, later.

After J. got home I continued to paint, tweaking a bit here and there, then finally decided to shut it down for the night.

That's where I made my big mistake. Somehow, do NOT ask me why, I just spaced. WP asked me if I wanted to save the document I put the notes in, and since I did, I said yes...and proceeded, somehow, to OVERWRITE THAT WHOLE SECTION OF THE BOOK I've been working on for months. So Part two--roughly a third of the book--was now 4 KB instead of close to 100.

OOOoooh, God! I was too stunned to cry, even. J. was wonderfully comforting, but that didn't bring back the document, of course.

Finally thought to check my external hard drive and thank all that's holy that I had, indeed, saved it there. September 27, but still...better than having to re-scan, re-OCR, and re-edit the ENTIRE thing.

The good news, of course, is that I'd been either sick or really busy in that time period, so I didn't get that much done. I lost a lot, but not as much as I might have. This version is up to caption #20 rather than the 53 captions I originally had, but it could have been much worse...

The moral to this story is BACK UP YOUR WORK. As in OFTEN. Heard that before? OH yeah. Now you're hearing it again.

Also, WP has an option of saving a backup copy...in theory, in any case it should be in there somewhere, with a .BK! extension instead of the usual .WPD. But if you've saved the original document, that copy goes away. I searched for anything with a .BK!, but nada...at least anything newer than months ago...

If you go into Tools/Settings/Files you can actually tell WordPerfect to save the original document as a backup. NOW I have it set to do that, and if you value your data, I encourage you to find that or a similar path in your own word processing program, and enable that option!

I didn't, of course, have it enabled. I also didn't have an unerase program on my computer, and I'm told if you install one now, you can never find your lost file. So back to the salt mines here, and hope that this happened for a reason. Maybe it'll be an even better book now..

"Don't let your mind wander..."