Back That Thing Up

That might've been a rap song I danced to in high school, but that's not why I'm using that title today.

My son dropped my laptop yesterday. 

I repeat, MY SON DROPPED MY LAPTOP YESTERDAY. The laptop containing all 50,000 words of a little thing I like to call MY FIRST BOOK.

For any Sex and the City fans, I felt a little bit like Carrie in the episode where her computer crashed (although, mine LITERALLY crashed, like onto the floor). It's a funny little clip if you have a couple minutes (don't worry it's totally G-rated).

My poor little guy, all he wanted to do was play his favorite computer game, but the laptop was sitting on top of the fireplace, you know, so little hands couldn't reach it. Apparently, those little hands could reach it after all.

I was upstairs in my bathroom doing my hair when I heard a giant crash, followed by a, "I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to! It was an accident, Mommy!" Of course, my Mommy reflexes kicked into high gear and all I could ask him was, "Are you hurt? Are you bleeding anywhere? Are there any severed appendages lying around here?" Hug, hug, kiss, kiss, "It's okay, sweetie. I know it was an accident. Now go play in your room for a bit, mkay?" 

Then I turned to look at the wreckage. As I picked up my computer to survey the damage, all I could see were dents in the top and a blank white screen, and all I could hear was rattling, which meant loose parts inside. Yikes.  

When was the last time I saved my manuscript? What about my outline? What about the ten pages of cuts I had just made and put into a separate document? Did I save it to my external hard drive? DON'T PANIC - DO. NOT. PANIC. 

And that's when I started to panic. I didn't stop panicking until...oh wait, I haven't stopped yet.

Fortunately, I had emailed the entire document to myself the two days ago, so the majority of my novel was recovered (all but about 5 pages that I had worked on yesterday). Unfortunately, those ten pages of cuts and that outline were not saved on my zip drive or emailed to myself, so they could be lost forever. 

Lucky for me, my  husband is sort of a tech genius, so he knows a guy who can fix it. That's sounds so mafia-esque, doesn't it? "My husband knows a guy." But this guy isn't someone who can off someone, he's a tech nerd who can possibly salvage my precious pages...even better in my book.

So today's lesson: BACK UP YOUR WORK. EVERYTHING. Save it to an external hard drive, flip drive, zip drive, email it to yourself, save it to your wireless network, whatever you have to do. You would think I would've done that, but I got a little lazy. Don't make my mistake!

Have you ever lost your work? How much? How did you handle it?