I know what this is like. I have written, but not published, two fantasy novels of 70k+ and a bunch of short stories. While I was working on my second computer, a crypto got on the network and locked my Dropbox. As the tech guy at the location, I was fuming at the one responsible for clicking the infected link. I lost about three months worth of work and editing. I didn't know that Dropbox had a rollback feature then and cleared the box. I honestly wonder how different the novels would have gone if I hadn't gotten out of doing a physical back up.
Were you able to recover the doc? I can't imagine how soul crushing this would be. I absolutely dread working in Word when it's time to start editing the doc. It's the only piece of software that crashes on my Mac. I've lost work before thanks to this POS but never 70K. I hope you were able to get the book back. You may have already heard some of this. Have you tried opening the .doc in a different program like Pages? Also if it's a .docx file I think that's a compressed file. Can you change it to a zip file, uncompress, and check the various files for your words?
Oh man. My house got hit by lightning many years ago - it destroyed my air conditioner and my computer, and took down everything I had written up to that point. This was so long ago online storage wasn't really a thing. I scraped together some stuff I had at various online places but it stopped me from writing for a long time afterwards.
Never was able to recover the files. I was working for months to rebuild from the few saves I did have, but I think I'm better for it. I was devastated it happened, but maybe it was for the best in the long run.
I haven't had any luck I opened the .xml but it was all screwy The only thing I haven't tried yet is some serious disk/data recovery, because I'm not 100% sure where to really try.
Thanks. I'm trying! I got my cover, which is great so I'm using that to refuel me. Started up again and have 3-5k words. Hopefully it comes out at least as good as what I had!
I am so sorry, I was working on a clients edit when this happened to me, many years ago. I lost the whole file and the computer actually set itself on fire. So, I totally feel you. I never recovered mine, but I do know that tech is a lot better now than it was back then. I hope you can fix it, but I am over cautios now, back up everywhere, two sets of cloud storage and then two discs. I never have enough, so also email full scripts too. If anyone needs an extra email to back up to, you can always mail me, I'll keep it in a file with your name on.
That's so nice of you! I'm sorry to hear about your issues too =\ I'm backing up to Dropbox now, not automatically in case it autobacksup another corrupted file, but after significant amounts of work. Then also occasionally e-mailing them to myself.
I hate to hear that man. One thing that I can encourage you with is that when you rewrite it you will be surprised how well you remember it. Even better is that each time you do a full rewrite it will be better than the last version. I almost swear by doing a full rewrite at least once. Now you may have already done one, but its definitely not the end for that story. Keep at it! I'm an old IT guy so I go a little overboard on saving. One copy on pc, one laptop, one usb drive, one google docs...
Type in Spotlight search bar "Disk Utility". Access your Macintosh Hard drive and click the Restore button. It should work if the hard drive is the problem.
You know what, I think I'm gonna write my novels on Google Docs and save them to this laptop and my desktop. Just in case.
