A Cautionary Tale ~ by Andi Lawrencovna

Let me begin by saying that this is a cautionary tale that has widespread implications for all walks of life and is not necessarily only applicable to writers or people using computers…though it is definitely more geared towards them.

You see, as the day began, I was doing awesome. I had just finished a couple Photoshop pictures that I was pretty dang proud of. They looked, in my humble opinion, pretty good. Now, to be fair, I didn’t “exactly” create the pictures. I was just putting words on them, because… Anyways, they looked good. I was super excited about them, couldn’t wait to show them off, and…issue one occurred.

Facebook, which I already “love” dearly, decided not to upload my photos. Okay. That’s fine. Whatever. But, as a backup system, there goes backup number one (I’m not going to mention foreshadowing here…but…you get what I’m not mentioning…).

Again, it’s fine. The pictures are saved to the jump drive I have plugged in, so all is going well.

I upload a picture for a friend. I upload that friend’s manuscript. Everything, surprisingly, goes through. The internet seems to be holding strong today without any shorts.

Whoop-de-do-ki-ay!

And then it happened. I was looking online for an action or an overlay or a something, perhaps that’s where the problems began in not knowing what I was trying to do, for Photoshop. I had a picture that I wanted to prettify and couldn’t figure out alone, and Facebook – LOVE THEM… – showed me an add for where to go to find said overlays and actions and whatnot.

The download was free!

What could possibly go wrong, right?

Not. Mentioning. Foreshadowing!

Now, before you start with the “oh no, poor you’s”, which will admittedly be deserved, ish, in a few moments, let me just say that my computer is fine. Nothing seems to have happened to my computer or gotten disrupted or infected or what not…knock on wood.

The jump drive, however – which I was saving the download to, and which had all my writing on it, particularly the few pieces which I was currently working on, not EVERYTHING, thank God, but the current most important stuff – was not.

Halfway through the download, with documents from the jump drive still open on my computer, I get a: “transfer cannot be completed; driver corrupted” message on my folder.

SO, of course, I did the smart thing and did NOT save the documents I had open to my computer where they were originally saved to the jump drive…no, I just closed them down unthinkingly.

I then proceeded to spend the next hour trying to finagle the jump drive into a spark of new life, because it had files on it that I HADN’T SAVED ANYWHERE ELSE YET!

A little backstory: I run a writer’s workshop group one Saturday a month. I try to pick topics that might be useful for the group, and one of the month’s topics was – saving your work to multiple sources so that you don’t lose it…

To be fair, I did not run that particular lecture but let the resident computer dude do it…

I did listen to it, though.

I did not follow the suggestions/instructions of Doug when he said: SAVE EVERYTHING AND THEN SAVE A BACKUP OF EVERYTHING!

Back to the present…

The files that I had just uploaded to Kindle to publish my latest novellas…are gone. I never saved them to my main computer, and now they have “poofed” out of existence on my “corrupted” jump drive.

My Photoshop awesome manipulation…is also gone, only the memory of my pretties left to sustain me.

The majority of my work is still safe, but the last edits of the latest pieces I was working on are no more, and I am back to square-ish-one. 

This is not the tragedy it could have been. My freshman year of college I somehow managed to bend a jump drive. I had just gotten a new computer, hadn’t saved over anything yet, and all of my writing was on that jump drive, which refused to open. My poor roommate came into the room and I was sitting on the floor rocking, and she asked: "What happened?" To which I responded, potentially melodramatically, but who’s counting: "My family died!"

I was holding the jump drive up at the time I said this. And she was also a writer. So she understood I did not mean my ‘literal’ family, but my imaginary made up ones which, for a writer, had consumed my life for some time. 

You would think that would have taught me a better lesson…but, apparently, it did not. 

Sigh. 

(shakes computer in muted rage while cursing everyone and everything silently in my head)

Long drawn out, useless SIGH!

There is a moral that I want you to take away from my ineptitude here. ALWAYS SAVE, DOUBLE SAVE, AND THEN SAVE AGAIN WHAT YOU ARE WORKING ON.

Whether it be a simple form for work, or a manuscript you’ve put your heart and soul into, make sure to save it. Make sure that if “it” is something you want to keep, that you have a safe place where you can keep a copy of “it” for the future. A story shared between family members, recorded from a grandparent for the future – make a copy of it, back it up, transcribe it so that it is not forgotten or lost or destroyed and someone can always find it. How many times in life have the simple things become misplaced only to be missed later on?

A jump drive is not the safest medium to save your work on. Nor a hard drive, nor the cloud or whatever. But saving something to multiple places gives you a better chance of keeping your work safe than only saving it to one.

Take my advice. Be safe, save your work, whatever that work may be, and then re-save it again. Don’t lose what you have because of a silly mistake or because of a corrupted file. Save everything, and appreciate it, because life changes and erases and goes by in a blink, and you never know what the next moment will bring.

The End.

(Who just went and re-saved all their work to somewhere else? I know I did…)