Well, s*** · 7:05pm Jul 28th, 2018
I was 5200 words into Chapter 13 of "So You Escaped From Limbo" and clicked Save, but Open Office wouldn't save. So I stupidly copied only the fifty-something words I had just added and closed out. I tried to reopen and the file is corrupted. Cannot repair. I tried opening it in notepad and wordpad. Nada. And no, I didn't save a copy. I used to save copies of my fanfic chapters on my flash drive, but I fell out of the habit of doing that.
Just FYI, I saved it as an odt file.
Fuck.
I rarely curse so this should tell you how pissed I am. I had already struggled through writing that chapter, and now more than 5000 words are gone. Shit. I don't know if I have it in me to rewrite it almost from scratch. But I hate to leave the story hanging where it is. Maybe I'll write a shorter epilogue just to wrap it up in a bow. And/or I could take a break from this story and start working on the sequel to "Earth Ponies Are Overpowered."
Flash tilted his head. “What in the world are you talking about, Discord? Is Fluttershy in danger?”
“Oh, I'm sure she's fine. She's probably not in mortal peril, at any rate.” Discord rubbed the back of his neck.
Stygian frowned, because if the Chaos Lord was concerned, then he should definitely start worrying.
And so should I, apparently.
I've been there dude. Lost a 4500 word chapter once before and it took me nearly two months to get motivation to rewrite the thing. The best advise I can give is to sit down eat a pair of hot pockets while drinking a root beer and watching your favorite show for an hour to simmer down and collect your thoughts. You'll better about yourself and when your up for it you can get back to it.
4909380
Thanks. I just downloaded some data recovery software. I'm not sure if it'll work, but I figured it was worth a try.
4909384
no prob, consider whenever you write something to save it on two different servers. For me I use both this Grammarly and Google.Doc's for a backup.
Sorry to hear that. My recommendation would be to use Google Docs so that any changes are saved immediately.
Well, horseapples.
I work with Open Office myself and have been for years; however, I had that same problem happen to me once before, at work, with a ~200 page long file overloaded with tons of reference-images. I remember finding a software that could restore the text from the file in some converted format, except for contained images. And maybe some of the formatting was off (fonts and fontsizes and all that), but I was able to cobble everything back together with an older backup.
Of course that was like a year ago and I don't have a clue what the program was called now.
The gist is, that there are ways to recover. Heck, you might not even need data recovery tools at all: http://www.andybrain.com/archive/mb/open-office-data-recovery.htm
I'll more or less echo what 4909380 said -- in this sort of situation, I'd default to doing something enjoyable and avoid thinking about this matter for a while, then come back when I'm calmer and think the whole mess through again. Personally I'd delay making a decision for a day or so, but I don't know what sort of timescale would sound reasonable to you.
4909394
I'll do that from now on.
4909413
Thanks for the tip - I'm looking at the linked page now.
Take all the time you need.
And this is why I prefer Google Docs.
4909384
I hope it works. I don't like watching you being upset.