Ever have one of those days? Or two of them maybe?
Yesterday, I completed the creative revisions on my upcoming novel, The Beat of a Different Drummer. Now I'm ready to start formatting it for publication.
I do all my work directly on a flash drive, and make periodic copies to my hard drive as a backup. I have been very busy with the final revision and realized it had been a while since my last backup, so I copied the book folder to the hard drive. (Note: that wasn't a full backup of the flash drive.)
With that done, I took a break and decided to reprogram my fancy schmancy remote control to work with my new bluray player (thank you wife.) I connected it to the USB port and the computer didn't recognize it, which is odd. So, being safe, I ejected the flash drive the correct way, and waited for Windows to say it was safe to remove.
It turned out to be a bad USB cord, but when I was done with the remote and inserted the flash drive to work some more, Windows spent a LONG time checking the flash drive, and then reported that all 16gb were empty.
Horror.
I checked my backups and found a full backup from 12/1, which along with my morning book backup, would be pretty up-to-date. So I started a recovery by copying the saved contents back to the flash drive. It failed and told me the flash drive was disconnected.
More horror.
I rebooted the computer and was pleasantly relieved to see the flash drive was actually intact.
Full BACKUP followed immediately.
DAY 2.
I started formatting today. Setting the fonts, the chapters, and most importantly the page headings with page numbers.
The fonts I used for the cover were not available to Word (I sometimes use MS publisher or Adobe Photoshop to provide cover fonts), so I chose to grab images from the cover and insert them in the front page. So far so good, until Photoshop froze the whole computer.
I had to think back, did I save my work? NO.
A hard reboot with crossed fingers. May I now say THANK YOU BILL GATES AND COMPANY!
Word opened with the OLD version sans formatting, but after a few moments, it offered up some backups it had made which I could choose to recover.
I'm taking a break for a while.