My old laptop died right in the middle of a writing sprint

It was last Tuesday night, and I was about an hour into a good flow on a short story. The screen just went black, no warning, and the power light went out. I tried the charger, different outlets, the whole deal. Nothing. That laptop was a 2015 MacBook Pro I bought used in Seattle, and it had all my old writing files and a bunch of half-finished prompts saved locally. I lost about two pages I hadn't backed up yet. I ended up digging out an old notebook and finishing the scene by hand, which felt strange after so many years of typing everything. It made me think about how I used to write all my first drafts in notebooks before I ever had a decent computer. Anyone have a good system for backing up work as you go, especially during long writing sessions?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenixw1110d ago

Okay, but "lost about two pages" is the key part. That's honestly not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. It feels awful in the moment, but it's just two pages. You even said you wrote it out by hand, so it's not truly gone. The real issue is using a nine-year-old computer as your only place for files. That's just asking for trouble. Auto-save on Google Docs or a simple USB stick backup once a week would have fixed this. The drama comes from the sudden crash, not the actual loss.

pat_jenkins9d ago

My buddy lost a whole chapter when his laptop died, like ten pages of his novel. He had it backed up on an external drive, but the file got corrupted somehow. The real kicker was he'd been putting off buying a new computer for years, always saying it still worked fine. He spent a week trying to rewrite it and said it never felt the same as the first version. Sometimes the gear itself is the problem, not just the backup plan.

seth_singh2010d ago

phoenixw11 says it's just two pages, but that's the whole point. Losing your flow is the real loss, not the word count. The old notebook trick works, but it breaks your focus completely. I keep a text file open on my phone and tap in a few words every paragraph or so. Sends to my cloud drive automatically.