Lost in the Cloud

I remember the days when I wrote on a typewriter. My mother had a Remington that felt like an anvil when I picked it up. When I went to college, I had an Olivetti portable. I thought I’d gone to technology heaven when I graduated to a Smith-Corona electric.

I always had a pile of manuscript pages on the desk next to my typewriter, ready for me to take a pencil and edit and then retype them.

I got my first computer about 40 years ago. I thought that was quite a step up, not having to retype pages. I could make corrections on the screen, though I printed out each chapter as I finished it.

My first printer was a dot matrix, the kind that used continuous sheets that had a little feeder strip on each side, with holes. I’d have to tear the pages apart. Those strips—well, one of my cats had a really good time with those when he got into them. Strips of paper strewn up and down the hall.

Then I graduated to an HP Laserjet the size of a TV set. It weighed about as much, too. I had that one for years before it finally died of old age. Enter the inkjet era.

I was still printing out manuscript pages, the old-fashioned way of backing up my data. I also copied files to floppy disks. Remember those? Then the floppies became smaller hard disks. Then it was flash drives. And external hard drives.

Then came the cloud, a place where one could store important data and free up space on the desktop or dispense with those disks and flash drives.

Works great. Until it doesn’t.

I recently had a hard drive meltdown. As in fried, toast, kaput. I thought my files would be safe since I was backing them up to the cloud, in this case Microsoft’s OneDrive.

But through some technological disaster I don’t understand, most of the files on OneDrive that were dated this calendar year disappeared—including the book I’ve been working on for over a year. I keep looking at OneDrive and everything on there seems to be 2022 or earlier. Except one lone spreadsheet I created on Excel in May 2023. Go figure.

After phone calls and emails with Microsoft Tech Support, the case has been escalated to the OneDrive department. Which assures me via periodic emails that they are investigating the situation and will be in touch with updates—whenever. These bland emails are meant to be reassuring.

I don’t feel reassured.

I mean, hey, the files should be there, floating somewhere in the cloud. After all, that’s the claim—store things on the cloud and your files will be safe from meltdowns and mishaps.

But no, it doesn’t look like it. I got complacent and relied too much on technology. Right now I’m longing for the low tech days when I printed out each chapter as I completed it. At least I’d have a hard copy. Or a flash drive. Yeah, that would be great. Then I could find my book.

I’m upset, since it seems increasingly likely that the files are lost in the cloud. And I do mean lost. But time spent kicking myself isn’t productive. I’ve started a synopsis of the book, memorializing what I’ve written so far. And I have started chapter one—again, reconstructing that from memory.

Say it the way Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields did: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”