20,000 words . . . lost.

WARNING: the following recounting is not for the faint of heart.  It's not a happy little tale, not a bedtime story for your children.  I'm still shaking.

Isn't technology great?  The first computer I ever used for storytelling was my parents' clunky Toshiba, running Windows 95.  It crashed, of course, stealing the pitiful beginnings of a manuscript I'd stored there, along with my motivation to continue writing the story.  Eventually, however, I did continue, and it endured into my first full-length novel: Destiny's Mistake.  A few other crashes frightened me along the way to this completion, but I think a month's worth of progress was the most I'd ever lost.

Until now.

I thought I'd learned my lesson, and over the years, backups grew more and more frequent.  Losing a few hours work every now and again -- mostly due to the haphazard electricity in Nigeria, where I grew up -- put the fear of technology in me.  Yes, I know better than most about the importance of regular system backups.  But I've never been very good at learning lessons.

Today was typical: I opened my computer and waited for Windows to resume.  This semester I'm trying to spend an hour a day working on personal writing, unrelated to school.  Microsoft's OneDrive cloud backup is my preferred method of storage: it's a supposed fail-safe against crashes, and is also convenient for accessing writing on devices other than my laptop and tablet.  The technology gods, however, are not always benevolent.

As I'd done a hundred times before, I accessed OneDrive and clicked on my God's and Chaos manuscript (early stages of the rough draft are posted on this blog).  But I instantly saw that something was wrong.  A small "x" was posted in the corner of the document.  When I tried opening it, an error message appeared: "the file cannot be accessed because parts are corrupted."  A chill trickled into my skull, but I tried again . . . and again, the same message greeted me.  The details link expounded on my file's corruption and the loss on my hope.

This document is 20,000 words long: far from completion, but still extremely significant.  It represents days and days of writing time -- basically my entire summer, plus some -- and I'm rather proud of various portions.

But there was no denying the situation: the document was gone.  Vanished.  Removed from this mortal plain.  With little hope of recovery.

Scenarios and possibilities scurried through my thoughts: the last time I'd opened this document was on the machine at the library's front desk.  Could that be a factor?  Should I contact I.T. at the library?  Surrender my computer to a techie friend?  Contact Microsoft?

It felt like static electricity was prickling my brain.

Alright, stay calm, Luke.  A brittle hope: try accessing OneDrive through the website rather than through the app on my computer.  I tried, praying fervently . . . I accessed the website, clicked on the folder . . . the list of documents stood before me, and like an angel of judgement, I picked the document in question.  As I did this, I noticed that all the other documents displayed script in their pictures, but this one just appeared blank.  (I'm sure there are technical terms for all these things, but I haven't the faintest idea what they are.)  For a moment, my hope teetered as the blue loading screen flashed before my eyes, just as it had in the failed attempts . . . and then the document opened, complete with text.  I scrolled to the end.  Everything was there.

But you can swear your life on the knowledge that there's now a second backup on my computer, and I'll probably make another on my external hard-drive.

For the cloud is mysterious.  Who can fathom its ways?