The Irrational Terror of it All or Losing the File

I lost a file.

I’m of course not talking about any file. I’m talking about the file, the one where you’ve gotten the last draft almost exactly where you want it. You know, sage, wise, fast-paced, thrilling, the bad guys are really bad, the good guys are in character. In short, if your readers are paying attention, they know who did it and what’s going on. Pride fills you; you make a note that bliss has been reached.

Then, the file is gone. Without a trace. A weird sort of calm sets in. You can handle this. Did I misfile it, like accidentally drop it into another folder? You search the file name through every blasted folder in your writing directory. Then the whole computer. Nope, it’s gone.

You check your backup. Nope. Gone. I mean, really, how can that even happen? What is the backup for if not to backup? What is the trash bin for, if not to collect deleted files and accidentally deleted ones? Reason takes flight. You begin to pant like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters. You know how dangerous this is; people faint. Remember the kids’ game? So you take a breath.

Now, I’m no amateur at finding files. In my day, I ran a proposal center that produced pages and pages of explicit, required text. Four proposal managers and a host of support people kept this churning. Files went missing. I had an assistant who could locate most files, even the ones you didn’t want unearthed. But when we arrived one day at 5 am, a vast swath of a proposal due to ship in two days had gone walkabout, in the Aboriginal sense. Gone, nowhere, unfindable, outta here. People were waiting to edit, print, and collate it. I’m talking millions and millions of dollars on the line.

We cocked our heads in opposite directions at near the exact moment. The last person in the file was our most precise and careful proposal manager, who was assisting the proposal manager in charge because she was on the verge of hysteria. You know the look after a while. I opened our rather massive file base, my assistant over my shoulder, and tried to think like a man. We found the files squirreled away in a directory in his sector, not the proposal sector, marked XXXX.

The moment he waltzed in, I walked into his office and uttered something akin to #$^%& were you thinking? His answer? “They’re in the proposal files.” I challenged him to find them. He couldn’t. Turns out, dog-tired, he had cleaned up a bit … you know how that goes, slide the files into the wrong sector, log out, go home at 4 am, get a shave and grab some food, come back at 10. What a piker.

So, you’d think I could handle losing a file. But no. I lost my tiny little mind. Thinking, thinking. If I accidentally deleted it and it wasn’t in the trash bin, might it not magically appear if I went back in time? I went to OneDrive and ordered my files restored to one day before the file took a hike. Don’t do this. Ever. Well, not ever, it can be beneficial.

When I checked the restore, the file wasn’t there, nor were any of the other changes I’d made in the last three days, all wiped out in my madness. Luckily, it was mostly the Bodie Blue Books newsletter (a copy of which I’d sent to my BBB partner) and sales reporting (which was recoverable).

Still, I thought, who cares? I’d used my ReMarkable for the final run-through and had my handwritten edits; all I had to do was open my unedited file and make those changes again.

Sigh. The notes were there yesterday, not today. Why, because the OneDrive restore resets the ReMarkable, wiping out all my edits. After considering several implements with which to slit my wrists, I had this major cool idea. What if I restored the OneDrive to yesterday?

We’ll see how that turns out. It’s not like I lost the whole book. Right?

For now, I await the recovery of my OneDrive files, hoping the notes on my ReMarkable magically reappear. If not, well, you know how that goes.

Let this be a lesson to you. Do not be me!

Discover more about D.Z. Church and the Wanee Mysteries, The Cooper Vietnam Era Quartet and my thrillers: Saving Calypso, Booth Island and Perfidia at https://dzchurch.com