I lost 60,000 words. SIXTY THOUSAND WORDS!
I have been wanting a way for my writing software, Scrivener, to sync between devices for a long time. Reaching out to Literatureandlatte, I asked about adding this feature. Though giving not the answer or the solution I hoped they would, they told me Dropbox can help do exactly as I wanted.
So me being me, I don’t understand how Dropbox or any tool like that (Dropbox, Google Docs, OneDrive, etc…) works. I don’t understand where my writing backups go on my computer or how to work backups anyway. But I thought I’d give Dropbox a try and see if I could get something working for me.
Well, I did all the things. I signed up, downloaded Dropbox on my computer, and did a test document from one of my Scrivener files that I don’t ever plan to go back and finish writing. When I opened the file from Dropbox, the Scrivener file opened fine on my desktop and I was able to keep writing and have Dropbox pick up the changes…
Great!
Now time to drop my baby into the new folder and hopefully be able to open it there from now on.
I don’t know what happened.
One minute I had the file moved over and was working on organization, and the next thing I knew I opened the file to do some work and my Scrienever file was blank. Those of you who use Scrivener know what I might be talking about. The manuscript name, chapter names, and subfolders were all still labeled correctly, but the documents were blank along with the notes and the index sections.
I spent an hour watching YouTube videos, reading support pages, and messing around with all my files, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t find the original version of my novel.
Sixty thousand words gone in a blink. Two years wasted.
The prospect of having to start the story over from scratch had me wanting to curl up into a ball in the corner and say forget it and never type another word ever again.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!
I had begun to hyperventilate, clicking around folders like mad. I finally found a weird folder in my original file place in my documents for some sort of metadata stuff and began to open them. Eventually, I found my chapters opening up in the old notepad-like window you could find back in the day on your PCs. You know, the one that kept typing across the screen forever and wouldn’t let you format in any way. Yeah, there were about 800 files of those. So I placed everything back into my documents folder on my PC, preparing to transfer over the words one copy and paste at a time and then opened up my Scrivener file of The Edge of Death and THERE IT WAS!
Everything was back! I don’t know how or what I did or what I didn’t manage to do. But somehow I fixed my files.
But for a good hour, all those words were gone and I was not okay. From now on I am not going to be messing with Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Docs or any of them. It’s just not worth it. I don’t understand them enough to consider going near them. Their power is too dangerous and destructive in my hands.
But oh yeah, hey! I reached 60,000 words! Let’s keep going. Only 90,000 more words to go… give or take.
Stela Loryn 