I love when the computer or the internet eats a nearly-finished masterpiece, leaving me to bang my head against the table. “I did it again,” I think. “I forgot to save my work. Doh!”
It always happens when I’m on a roll — my fingers are flying, the words are flowing onto the screen. I’m caught up in the moment, enraptured by the brilliance of my words.
And then I fat-finger some keys and — it’s gone. And head meets table.
This problem has such a simple fix: save your brilliant words periodically. Most word processing software has an autosave function, so you can retrieve what you wrote XX minutes ago (XX = the minutes between autosaves). But there’s still the issue of losing what you entered in the “XX minus now” timeframe. But it’s better than losing everything.
If I’m using word processing software, I don’t just rely on the autosave function. I will do a physical save, as in File – Save the document periodically. Depending on how clumsy I’m feeling on the keyboard, I may save my work every paragraph or so. You can usually set up a keystroke shortcut to do the saves after your initial File – Save – document name.
The number one place I will fat finger is while I am writing email at the day job. Depending on your office email system, you may be able to retrieve some of the information from a temporary storage file. Investigate if you have a Save Draft function for your email, or if your email system autosaves to a temporary directory.
We use Lotus Notes at the day job; I have the Notes/Temp directory set up as a desktop shortcut because I’ve messed up so often. That Temp directory has saved my bacon many times. Read the fine manual or online documentation that comes with your email system to find out if there are directories or special functions that will save your text.
Despite your best efforts, there will come a time that you lose the text you have so carefully written. No retrieval method will bring back your words.
For those moments, I have this word of comfort: while the words you have lost are brilliant, the re-write/re-creation you do will be even better. I don’t know if it’s adrenalin or just that my brain has had a chance to reframe my thoughts. But every time, I find the next draft is even better.
Remember: save early and often. You’ll reduce a source of writing headaches, especially those caused by banging your head on the table because you forgot to save.
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