A Nightmare.

Back in November, my husband's laptop completely died. It was only a couple years old, but it simply decided it was done and it was no longer going to work.

Since I have two computers, a laptop and a desktop, we decided to bring over the desktop in the meantime for him to use. My desktop was built in 2004 or so, so in computer terms, it is a little on the older side. But it has served us both well. It needs to be reformatted and will be done shortly.

My laptop is also from around 2005 or so. It too needed to be reformatted badly. It decided one day to stop opening PDF files, which was a huge pain in the butt, and it wouldn't load any new programs. I couldn't update any of the programs I was using or that program wouldn't work anymore.

We decided to reformat my laptop first, which husband kindly did for me last night. Before he started the process, he told me to make sure I saved everything onto my flash drive, which I did.

Lo and behold, I got to reload all my documents, writing, and pictures this morning and everything from the last year and a half is missing. All that is on the flash drive is the backup I had done about a year and a half ago. All the pictures I had saved in the intervening time were gone, as well as all my professional documents (my resume, cover letters, letters of rec...all gone). The new novel I was writing is also gone. I have the first two chapters in my gmail account, but the other 7? Gone.

Fortunately I saved my blog files in a different file, as well as a few other random things that are important to me (mainly my huge Excel spreadsheet with my books).

However, I am so upset that I lost everything else. Some of the writing I could care less about, but I am missing lessons I wrote in the last few months of my long-term subbing job that I worked really hard on. The professional documents are also a huge loss. I don't know how I will recover some of those items, but I think I can get a few of them off of the websites I am registered on. I also think that most of the pictures are backed up on Facebook, which is fine.

The biggest loss is my personal writing, and the new novel I was working on. To know that all those hours of typing, thinking, drafting, and editing are gone is what is really getting me down. I won't get any of that back, and I am kicking myself now for not backing it up earlier, especially knowing that my laptop was on its way out.

Anyway, lesson is learned. And I know that when Matt goes to reformat the desktop, I am going to quadruple check everything.