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Yesterday, I felt a terrified panic that would have been right at home in a slasher flick. I’d been working on writing a horror short story for the past couple of weeks. It has gone through reviews by two people, and I was putting the finishing touches on it this weekend.
I had reached what I thought was a perfect draft. I’d cut the extraneous fat. I’d honed the scenes of dread and terror.
It was a thing of dark beauty.
Yesterday morning, I was all prepared to do a final check before submitting the story to a contest. I opened up the recents option for Microsoft Word.
My story wasn’t there.
That’s odd. I’d just been working on it. I searched for it on my local hard drive.
It wasn’t there.
I searched for it in my OneDrive.
It wasn’t there.
I looked into an email where I had shared a link to the document with a friend. Ah! The link was there. I clicked into it.
Document no longer exists.
What?! I had been diligently saving my document, and it was saved in the cloud. How could it be gone? I don’t remember deleting it at all.
My heart was pounding, and I looked in one last place. My recycle bin for OneDrive. Oh, thank God! It was there. Somehow, I had deleted it. I was at a loss. There was no way that I had deleted it consciously. I’m so thankful that OneDrive keeps my deleted documents for a short amount of time. But what if I had been too busy to work on it, and I had let it sit for a month or two? Would the file still be there? Nope. Turns out that OneDrive only saves personal files in the recycle bin for 30 days.
I shared my horror with my friend, and she said that’s why she emails attached story files to herself as a backup. I may very well start doing that rather than sharing a link.
I am also writing my 50,000+ first novel in Scrivener, and I had been content with saving it to my desktop. But, after this panic-inducing deletion, I will also export the files to a Word document each night, and maybe email that to myself as a backup as well.
This whole episode has made wish that word processing software lets you pick an option for story drafts that makes it nearly impossible for you to accidentally delete a file. It needs to blare a loud alarm, and you must click 20 different “Are You Sure” boxes before it deletes the file.
In lieu of that, back up, back up, and back up your files. It’s very possible your story, like my short story about demons, is haunted and will accidentally delete itself!
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