Back the fuck up!

That’s what I thought was happening, but it wasn’t.

Every night when I’m done writing, editing, or doing whatever I’m doing, I copy my files into a Google Drive folder. That folder auto syncs with my Google Drive account – or, at least, it’s supposed to. I’d checked it several times in the past to make sure it was syncing and it was. But, somewhere between then and now, it stopped.

A couple of days ago, I opened up my laptop and pressed the power button. Nothing. Blank screen. I tried again and got the same result. After doing some research and running some diagnostic tests, I realized that the problem was with my hard drive.

“Nothing to worry about,” I thought to myself. “All my important files, the book I’ve been working on for months and everything else is safely backed up to Google Drive.”

Nope. They weren’t. Imagine my surprise when I logged into my Google Drive account to find that the last sync was months ago.

I don’t get angry easily or often – but I was livid. I couldn’t believe that I’d lost months and months worth of hard work.

After doing some research, I decided to take the hard drive out of my laptop and plug it into the USB port of another laptop. It recognized that there was a drive there, but it couldn’t access any of the files.

I did even more research and came to the realization that there’s nothing more I can do. My only option now is to bring the hard drive to a professional and pay between $500-2500 to see if they can get my files off it. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to.

So, the book I’ve been editing and getting ready to release is trapped on that hard drive. Even if I’m able to get it back, the cost of having the data restored is going to cut deeply into any profit I might make from it.

The lesson here is: Back the fuck up! Back up everything manually. Double check. Triple check. I never want this to happen again.

I’ve heard stories of writers losing entire manuscripts and always wondered why they didn’t have it backed up. Well, now I understand. I lost about two months worth of hard work. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a manuscript that you’ve been working on for several months – years even.

But it’s not just my work that was on that hard drive. Pictures of all the wonderful adventures I went on over the summer and the people who joined me. Journal entries about those adventures. Music projects that I’ve been working on. So much important data, gone.

I really hope that they can get the files off my hard drive but I’m finding it hard to be optimistic. Even if they can, it’s going to cost me a lot of money.

This was a frustrating and expensive lesson. Learn from my misfortune: Back the fuck up!