Path to Publishing | Lesson 2: Don’t Lose Your Words or Your Hope

It was a rookie writer’s mistake that cost me a lot. I was so busy creating I forgot the very practical—always back up. To the cloud. To a hard drive. To a thumb drive. Somewhere.

I could have just used the old trick of emailing a copy to myself. But I didn’t. Last month I lost not only a week’s worth of edits on the final draft of my manuscript, I lost the latest version of my 50,000 Word document itself. How is that possible? I will walk you through my mistakes in hopes they never happen to you.

It started with an OS update installed while I was sleeping. My daughter, Maddie who has a Master’s in Digital Analytics, tells me that was my first mistake. Never leave your laptop open and plugged in overnight. The software fairies think they are being helpful by installing updates while you have your eyes closed. By the time I came down the next morning, the damage had already been done. My computer told me that I needed to restart because of this seemingly innocent update. I dutifully pressed Restart. I never saw my computer hard drive or my files again.

At first, I wasn’t panicked. The black screen with the white Apple logo had a bar beneath it confidently telling me that I had only 44 minutes remaining. I picked up a book I had been meaning to read and drank my tea waiting for the moment I could jump back into my writing. It was Monday morning and I had spent much of the weekend making fresh edits to the book I was planning on finishing by Wednesday. After two and a half years, I was literally on the one-yard line of a hundred-yard writing field. When the updating bar finished, it brought up a screen that told me there had been an error and I needed to Restart again. So, I did. With a similar wait time and then, a similar error message. It was starting to dawn on me there was a problem.

I won’t bore you with how many times I tried this or details of the two hours I spent on the phone with Apple support. I would learn my computer could not be rebooted in recovery mode and that the only Genius Bar appointment I could get was almost two days and two hours away in Greenville, SC. 

I began Googling for local support technicians and my first call let me know it would be over $1000 and 7 days to see if he could recover anything. So, I drove my laptop that was starting to look more and more like a ticking time bomb to a data recovery center that advertised emergency service. After I waited for an hour and a half, Ron, the data guru guy, was very encouraging from his initial diagnosis. When I left my MacBook Air with him, he promised to call that night with an update.

As I waited that afternoon for news, I started to remember a few of the other files I needed. PowerPoints, I used in teaching, speeches I had written for presentations, Excel spreadsheets I used in my business. Only 8 weeks before, I had launched a new business, and while some of the documents lived in a shared Google drive about 50% of them did not. I started to sweat as I thought about all of those that did not. When was the last time I backed up?

It was almost 5:30 pm when Ron, the data guru guy, called with the news.

“Well, it seems there is some kind of damage to your hard drive,” he told me. “We are having a little trouble.”

“So, you can’t save the computer but you can still get the files?” I asked.

“If I am being honest with you,” he said,” it’s not looking good.”

Hanging up, I was deflated but not devasted. I still didn’t understand how big my problem was. Until I checked my external hard drive thinking I had just a few week’s problems. But it was five months problem. Apparently, the last time I backed up was over five months ago. The last saved version of my book was what I called Version13.0. Over the weekend I was working on Version16.0. Three versions old. On my crippled laptop, I had a folder with hundreds of files relating to my new business. Not one appeared on this backup drive. I had been so busy creating, I had spent not ten minutes protecting.

Now, I started to cry. 

While I could get a replacement laptop, I could not easily get replacement files. I would need to start again piecing together what I could and trying to learn from a really, really stupid mistake. It would take weeks but some of my work has been digitally dumped forever. The rebuilding process has helped me get some perspective on my book, my work, and life.

On the same day, I was overwhelmed by the loss of my words, my friend’s mother taken by ambulance to a hospital. Another friend was wrestling with breast cancer and a double mastectomy. My best childhood friend was in the hospital with Stage 4 throat cancer. In the scheme of things, I really didn’t have a bad day losing my computer or the latest version of my book or any of my teaching PowerPoints.

I have already created new teaching lessons and in fact, I like them better. I have already begun finishing the final edits and I am surprised how I remember what I had wanted to write. And most important, I have a double backup system in place using Google Drive and an online service called Carbonite. Ron, the data guru guy, says in five years he has never seen it fail to recover data.

I don’t plan to lose my words or my hope ever again.

- Kathy

Kathy Izard is an award-winning author, speaker, and change-maker working on homelessness and mental health in Charlotte, NC. You can find her teaching others to write and to trust their whispers on Women | Faith & Story or learn more about her books on her website.

Each month in collaboration with Writing for Your Life, Kathy posts an article to help you navigate publishing. You can also signup to take a monthly Path to Publishing workshop on the second Friday of the month and other live online writing classes Friday mornings at 10:00 am EST. Check the Women | Faith & Story event calendar for the latest sessions.