We all know how important it is to back your work up on a regular basis.  But do you actually do it?  And what would happen if you lost your work?  How would you recover it?

This was my dilemma last weekend.

After a productive week of editing I was feeling pretty good about my progress on The Warlock of Ravenswatch.  I’m not sure why editing takes about ten times longer than I expect it to, but it does.  Anyway, I try to back things up regularly, and I have an automated backup program installed too, so when my computer started acting up and doing the “I’m on the verge of failing” thing that Windows machines love to do, I went ahead and copied my latest version to a flash drive.  But something went horribly wrong.  Most likely I hit move rather than copy, got distracted, hit a few wrong buttons, and things went downhill fast.  So there I was looking at a horribly corrupted Scrivener file, a flaky computer, and no recent version of my work.  To make matters worse, my automated backup wasn’t functioning well either and hadn’t been for a while.  I did have older versions on flash drives, but I hadn’t been religious about backing up every day.  I had lost about a week of work.

I tried doing a disk recovery and wasted about two days on that.

I started rummaging around in the files that Scrivener creates to see what I could find.  Fortunately I was able to find the base text rtf files.  Somehow I managed to corrupt the Scrivener project file and it was looking at older text files.  I created a copy of an older, uncorrupted Scrivener project, copied the text files into the Scrivener project file and like magic my latest work appeared.  Whew.

This is just a reminder to do your backups.  🙂