Disaster Strikes · 9:25am Apr 27th, 2015
Okay, time to vent for a few minutes. So, imagine you spend a dozen hours or two crafting the next chapter to a story you really care about. Even if not very many people read it, you're still super passionate. Then, disaster strikes. Your computer decides screw you and it corrupts the files. You spend another five hours and your not considerable talent with computers to try and recover the files. In the end, you're left with malformed crap and all the text is gone beyond recovery, an entire chapter's worth.
You think. "Worse things have happened, I'll write it better the second time.". You spend hours recreating what you had, not sure if it's anything close to the text you had the first time. You do your best, and end up finishing the chapter on time to get to the editors. All's well that ends well.
You go to output the file. It's corrupt again. Another three hours or so retracing your steps from the first time this happened, all to no avail. All the backups you took after you got burned earlier in the week have mysterious vanished.
This is what happened to the last in-story chapter for MLA: Apogee. I now have nothing to give the editors, and have lost all desire to recreate the text a THIRD time.
Not sure what to do now. Maybe write different scenes about different characters, though the plot points would go unresolved. Upon further work, I managed to save the first scene of the chapter, though the other two were corrupt beyond recovery. I've done my best, everypony. I just don't know what to do now.
-Starscribe
Well that's some shit happenings...
What I'd say to do is note down anything that you'd rather not be left out of the chapter. Step away for a day or two and then come back to it.
Well crap, I'm not sure what to say that would be helpful. I really would like to read the chapter with the scenes that you originally intended to include, even if it's the third attempt at them.
I would suggest writing everything on something like Google Docs, which synchronizes live as you write. Dropbox is also good, synchronizes every time you safe a file. Won't help, but will prevent it from happening again.
As for what to do now: Relax a bit. Maybe take a walk? A bit of time can do wonders to make frustration melt away.
An author's worst nightmare. I would suggest entirely rewriting it from the ground up after 24 hours.
Uurgh... That's awful.
I think your best bet might be to save to a Dropbox folder. Google docs is impractical at a certain point because it slows down with the large text files we're using. But Dropbox will allow you to keep using Scrivener and still save it to the cloud.
Unless... Were you already using Dropbox as the place you were backing up and it got mysteriously vanished from there?
Hmm... You might also try sending a feedback ticket to the Scrivener for Linux team. Wasn't it still in beta?
Terrible, I'm sorry you ran into these issues.
If I were you I'd first confirm my hardware and software are functioning correctly. Corrupted files are almost unheard of when everything is working properly, but faulty software can repeatedly cause files to be corrupted. Software gets corrupted usually by a hardware issue, but the hardware wouldn't fail as often (else the computer would be unusable).
In short:
Reinstall your software (this is a given, it's failed twice so far), and do hardware tests like a hard disk scan, among other tests (memory test would be my next suggestion).
Consider using a backup service of some kind like Dropbox
Consider using an online writing service like GoogleDocs.
There are some addons to popular writing software (microsoft office and libre/open office) that would also do automatic online backups once you install them and set them up, so I recommend using those if you feel the need to not use GoogleDocs
Sorry *hugs* I'd try something like gdocs or at least taking your files and saving them in dropbox every once in a while.
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I was using Scriviner for Windows to do the actual writing, which was saving into my dropbox folder. Unfortunately, I hadn't changed Scrivner's default backup settings, which meant it only kept five copies. That was few enough that the change propagated to all of them before I actually discovered the issue. Also unfortunately, Scrivner doesn't save backups to the same location as the project files, but to some weird local appdata folder. I've corrected this, and also told it to never delete backups, but I think I'll write the rest of this story in gDocs just to be safe.
I was able to use a local backup on my linux machine to save one of the scenes, so that's good. 2000/8000 words is better than nothing.
3023653 Dropbox itself has some sort of versioning of your files. Not sure how many versions it keep by default, but you could check it.
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That was one of the first places I looked, but unfortunately it only had the blank version of those files and then the corrupt versions. X.x
This is why I do all my writing in a text editor instead of a word processor.
Text editors get the job done.