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Don't you hate this!

Willow's Tara

The Bewitched
Don't you hate this.
You are working on a story that could be potentially quite powerful and emotional. You are so into the story you barely noticed the world around you, not even the save button on your word document or the music blaring out of your computer.

You are so into the story, the characters capturing you, feeling like you are right there when Amelia has a breakdown or when Tanya screams in agony the thought of losing her entire family again so much pain to bare (Two characters from the story btw). You are so into it...

Then suddenly the word document for no reason at ALL freezes up, you realize in horror (And thinking where should I dump this crapola) that there might not be save. You wait hoping the freeze will goo away but nothing so you click exit and it crashes.

You rush back to the word document hoping just hoping that it managed to autorecover every single word of it. You noticed the auto recover timestamp is different to the time you were just writing it and you enter to discover two pages are missing!

Yep two pages of emotional and powerful scenes all gone, and with it so is your muse/inspiration. You try to recreate the scene but the inspiration is gone and you don't even remember what the characters were saying because of it and you rewrite but what they say you know is different compared to what they really said.

So has this ever happened to everyone? And you think someone who has played the game Oblivion lots of times and constantly saved because well Oblivion crashes for no reason at times, and then that habit seeks into other games and stories you write. But of course since you are so into the story and the only thing you are thinking what will happen next in the story that you forget to save (And auto recover can be a pain and a help combined)/.
 

Venomfrog

Perpetual Observer
Never on computer, but I lost four quality chapters of Sea Cottage in the washing machine. Why, oh why, did I have to put them in a large jacket pocket? Right, to work on at school since I had quite some free time. I forgot to take them out before the laundry was done. What followed was shredded, blotched paper.

In total, that was seventy pages of handwriting. I have not even completed the first of the four lost chapters, since despite knowing how the plot goes along, I am having trouble recreating the interactions and symbols.

I keep myself motivated by writing a bit every day, but I understand your disappointment, Willow's Tara. Having all of that effort need to be reapplied can be quite draining.
 
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Mrs. Lovett

Rolling writer
Yes! I've lost countless pages of my fanfiction, and other writings in general, to my computer freezing, or my toe accidentally finding the 'power' switch on my computer. I had to learn the hard way that you always have to save your work.Believe me, I've lost enough pages/chapters/etc. to learn from it. Pressing CTRL+S is almost second nature to me now. Even if I've only written a paragraph, if I like it, then I save it automatically. No matter how 'into it' I become, I always remember to save every page or so. The most I've ever lost recently is a paragraph, and that's easily recovered.
(This is why I prefer writing in a notebook :p I can keep it in one place, and I never have to save my work, sicne it's already on the page.)
 

Willow's Tara

The Bewitched
Venom- Whoa that's no good, I prefer writing on the computer basically because I write faster. I might try to rewrite the two pages but it won't be as good probably. From I remember at the time Ellanore was telling Amelia how she knew what it felt like to be alone because she had been for five hundred years. Charlie goes to the hospitial to see his twins and Dani teleports him.
I am pretty sure Amelia says something else and Stephanie goes to hug her.

Cut scene to the FBI agents of the group and they are driving down the road in their thoughts until Tanya demands to get out and screams to the sky, Elizabeth embraces her and they slid to the floor with the others watching and then that's when it froze. Maybe I can recreate this

Lovett- I know I am always the type to constantly save, sometimes even when I am too into my story I take a break and remember save (However with A world unknown a 4000 page story seems to save every few minutes then it did with New Years Terror which is this story)
 

Shinneth

Fail-Leader!
My experience was actually spending 3-4 hours on a Sailor Moon fanfic when I was maybe... what, 12-13 years old? I barely remember it and it was likely crap, but I never ever saved it as I wrote it... and coming from someone like me who tl;dr's a lot, I'm sure it was huge.

Only when I finished the story did I click save. And for no apparent reason, the computer decided to completely crash on me the second I clicked that button and everything was gone. Pretty upsetting.

I've... been considerably luckier since then, especially in these days when programs like Word will automatically save a temporary copy of what was written but couldn't be saved before a program/computer crash. Those have saved my butt quite a bit in recent years. But yes. Harsh, harsh lessons to learn in the art of writing a story on the computer. Just my bad luck that my handwriting sucks too much to ever do it on paper. Hopefully modern technology will keep improving!
 

Super_Nerd

Writer of Stuff
I've had this experience, sort of, in forum writing--when I would do everything in a reply box, and try to submit it, only to find out the hour (or whatever) had passed and my post was timed out.

Now I write in Word and am a habitual ctrl + s-er. Sometimes after each sentence.

I know it's very, very difficult to go back and re-write something you've already done, and somehow, it never seems as good. The only thing to do is to re-create it as best you can and move on.
 

FlameRose

Well-Known Member
I've had it happen once or twice with writing school papers, but luckily NEVER with any of the fanfics I'm attempting. And since I have word, it'll auto save most of the time.

My advice? Save after every paragragh or so, so even if that IF it freezes, you'll still have most of it saved.
 

Willow's Tara

The Bewitched
Shin- Well when you are younger you are prone to those mistakes, I probably did the same thing but the auto recover usually always worked just in time, just not this time.

Actually I did rewrite it, I went for a walk and remebered what happened after Ellanore's sentence in the story, one of the other main character teleports (Supernatural) in and has his scene before going to the agents, it's almost the same now but still it was annoying.
 

bobandbill

Winning Smile
Staff member
Super Mod
I've had this experience, sort of, in forum writing--when I would do everything in a reply box, and try to submit it, only to find out the hour (or whatever) had passed and my post was timed out.

Now I write in Word and am a habitual ctrl + s-er. Sometimes after each sentence.
Heh, me too. I tend to have a few spare documents opening for copying relies into them if they're long enough to warrant it.

I can imagine it'd be annoying as heck to have stuff get lost like that. It hasn't happened to me yet though - auto-save tends to work very well for me and have had no problems with it, although maybe it's because I'm in the habit of saving very often when I'm writing, and sometimes multiple copies as well so at the worst I have a different version of something to fall back on, although it hasn't come to that yet.
 

KingRaichu

Hail to da king baby
This only happened when i wroked on a history report a whole back...that was...terrifiying...
 

Willow's Tara

The Bewitched
KR- That has to be the worst, because you have to hand it in at a determined time so it's not like you can just say I will get to it whenever I feel like it.
 

Ysavvryl

Pokedex Researcher
Ouch. I don't like those experiences. For me living in a rural area, though, it's less often the computer freezing and more often the power going out without warning. Last time it happened was during NaNoWriMo when the power went out for three hours without warning (probably some dumb squirrel again...). That was a nerve-wracking three hours, in which I wasn't sure how much had survived. Luckily, auto-save caught all but two paragraphs and those were easy to rewrite.

The worst experience, though, wasn't with a writing program. It was with another message board I was a member of. I had three long fanfics and a single one-shot on that board. I was using a different computer at the time, one that used diskettes (yes, that old). The board switched servers due to changes in traffic and any post of a length more than half a page on Word was messed up beyond repair. So I lost four entire stories with backup on diskettes that current computers don't recognize without specialized add-ons. Grr.... at least those diskettes are safe.
 

Venomfrog

Perpetual Observer
Venom- Whoa that's no good, I prefer writing on the computer basically because I write faster.

A bit impossible when my home computer is not working. :p Besides, I get more done when writing by hand and think better when typing it out, so it is a process for me.

Some of these stories are quite harrowing. Now I am grateful I have my fan fiction posted on two forums, in case something peculiar happens on either one.
 

Air Dragon

Ha, ha... not.
It's happened to me sooooo often, i just don't want to think about it anymore.

Now i make sure i save every page and i set my autorecover time to a maximum of 5 minutes. Just to be safe.

The most annoying thing about the topic is not losing the data but having to reproduce it when it came straight from the emotions that just aren't there anymore. That's why i really hate it when this happens...

L@er!
 

Willow's Tara

The Bewitched
AD- Yeah that's what I mean, the first time you write it you can actually feel for them but when something like that happens it's hard to get it back the second time around.
Venom- That's no good, I am not that good with writing it on paper, it just feels more comfortable on the computer
 

Dragonfree

Just me
...funnily enough, that has never happened to me. Thanks to autosaving, the most I've lost of actual writing is a few sentences, and out of those sentences at most I forget a word or two (which usually comes back to me if I stare at the new sentence for a couple of minutes).

That said, I could tell you stories about having typed up forum posts and then cruelly losing them. Once I was judging a sprite contest, already behind on posting the results, and was typing out my lengthy evaluation of the very last contestant when the power suddenly went out. That wasn't fun.
 
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Chozo

My Serebii face
This is pretty much why I CTRL+s everytime I type something up. Even if I do decide to change it back later, it's usually fresh enough in my head that the constant saving doesn't really get in the way.

Of course, I'm one of those people who will obsessively save every 10 steps in a game if given the option, so...
 

Willow's Tara

The Bewitched
Dragon- Oh yeah that's happened to me as well, on my sis's computer however when you press back (Because the connection stopped or something) it was still there, however at this computer it doesn't do that.

Huh, suddenly I am getting an De va ju of this kind of thread, weird.
Chozo- I never really about that when I am writing, should try to make a habit of that.
 

Aladar

Dark lord of Sith
Well, I do save the document from time to time, but gladly, losing part of the story has never happened to me. And I hope it won't as well in the future.

But when it comes to computer games, I have the habit of saving every 1--15 minutes or so. If it's something important or quest related- even under 5 minutes. It doesn't hurt to be prepared.
 

Llama_Guy

Awesomely awesome
Well, I have an autosave feature in my brain, so I kinda hit Ctrl+S (or in games, F5) without realizing it quite often. I'm always surprised when I start a new document and suddenly the Save screen appears, telling me to name whatever document I was working on.

And what little there is left is either so little I can re-write it from memory, or it's caught and saved by the auto-restore feature.
 
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