In which I am serially stupid again, and I lose (almost) a whole novel

EDIT: I have lost NOTHING. Dropbox has a "previous versions" function and I can restore everything.  Tomorrow.  Now I am going to sleep.
.....................................................

So.
The laptop I got from Frank was annoying and Word saved the files kind of mungy.
Googledocs hiccuped on some of the files and lost a few words here and there.
The laptop died, but everything was on googledocs.
Istarted wiorking on the desktop.
This had the advantage of allowing me to work in wordperfect again.
I supposed I ought to be saving my files in a more universal format, so I changed everythign to be automatically saved in .rtf.
I heard dropbox was a mighty fine offsite backup, it saves automatically when you save your files at home. So I set up a dropbox.
and that was my backup.
Yep, one backup.
I decided it was hightime to make a master document.
I made a master document.
I opened the master document after I finished today's writing (and got to 95K words and the end of the chapter before all hell breaks loose)
and . . . everything is gone.
Every chapter in the master document has been replaced by a weird little notation, the name of the link in the master document code.

And my backup . . . saved automatically when I saved on my home computer, so my backup is destroyed too.

I still have trwelve and a bit chapters in an earlier version in googlediocs, only slightly munged,
so I guess I have only lost about four months' work (I was going slowly because I was also heavily revising all the early stuff)

I can't believe how I find new ways to be stupid and lose everything all the time.
and now it is after 1:30 in the morning and I want to start rewriting right now but I have to go to bed so I can clean the house some more in the morning.

those two quotes for the 7 lines thing still exist, in their original contexts.