Cursing myself...

My main computer started going a bit weird last spring - basically the hard drive was slowly dying - so as I tried various fixes (I ended up replacing the drive) I picked up a new to me laptop.

While the hard drive problem was eventually fixed, all summer I've been using that laptop to write various stories, using a copy of open office. For various reasons, virtually of these stories were in one long file. Call it hundreds of pages long, about 335k on the hard drive. Most of them were short stories - ones I intended to proofread during periods of writer's block - but two were partially complete long ones. One of those long ones was over a hundred pages - and almost finished. I'd planned to finish it during the long weekend, then start proofing the others. It involved some college girls spending over a week on an alternative world and I had it almost finished - I just needed to do a wild party on Saturday followed by them returning home on Sunday...

Hundreds of hours spent writing over the summer, and it is all gone. Not only didn't I back up, but I knew there is a flaw in open office that could destroy the file, and it is now gone. You see, if the laptop enters sleep mode without manually saving the file and the laptop is then dropped, the open office file becomes filled with
###############
Page after page is now filled with those number signs. I had lost a file earlier this summer the same way, and told myself I wouldn't be that careless again...

Alas, I was.
Now to try to remember the stories that are lost, or at least the outlines...

I have also had my lost-file disasters over the years, but nothing like that! I truly feel your pain!

That said, don't give up too early. You might haunt some Open Office forums to see if there are any recovery options. You never know.

Thanks for the encouragement, but I haunted the open office forums the first time this happened. Which is why I am cursing myself. All I had to do was hit control-S before closing the laptop and this wouldn't have happened a second time.

I wonder if backing up to a separate USB-powered hard drive (copying the same information that's on your computer to a separate drive) would work? Of course, your copy of Open Office is on your main computer and if there's a glitch, it might affect the backed up stuff too...

Oh, there are many, many ways I could have backed it up - but I didn't. And I have no one to blame but myself. I hate it when that happens.

You should check out dropbox. It's free, and it's great for keeping files synchronized between machines. It's also perfect for keeping stories safe from hardware failures. Best part is that when you want to link someone your story, you can just right-click the file and hit "generate URL."

Google Docs also offers a similar functionality, but it's not as seamless since you have to manually upload files. With dropbox you just save the files into a folder and it's done.

That is truly a sad tale GG. More than a mere lost weekend. We have all lost stuff, but that is a particularly bad case. You have my sympathies.

I have started to use Dropbox to share files with myself, it does make it easier to always work on the most up to date version if you use more than one machine, but I do have qualms about my master copies of things being out of my own hands and stored on someone else's server.

Having said that, that was the way it used to be in computing until internal storage became cheap.

And taking the opportunity for a SSP ( shameless self-plug) my story "The Memory Stick" is about computer data loss.

I loved that story!

Does anyone know if I can have a separate drop box account than another person if we share a computer?

I don't know the answer to that and I have not been able to find out by searching the dropbox site. You could just try and see what happens. I think the account is linked to an email address rather than a computer i.d., and you are able to move the dropbox folder on your computer away from the default location, so as long as you had done that for the first user first I think it would be ok.