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

[ritaxis]

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Every chapter in the master document has been replaced by a weird little notation, the name of the link in the master document code.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.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you had really lost everything in the Master Document or whether you had somehow switched it to show the fields rather than the contents?

Anyway, you had the Dropbox backup, so that question is purely academic.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I thought something like that too, but in Explorer the files had gone from 65-100 Kb to 3Kb, and opening the files in Open Office revealed the same bit of text. What had happened was that the contents of the documents had been replaced by their labels.

[carbonel]

I was about to make a comment to your previous post about how Word's Master Documents feature was totally untrustworthy and you should never get rid of the original documents. I don't know if this problem is related to that, but I'm very glad your backup will save you.

(I have everything backed up except for the separate drive on which I keep my audiobooks and music. Guess which one is the one that's acting flaky.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

In word perfect, you don't get rid of the original documents: the master document is really just a collection of links.

My backup is, however, inadequate, and I plan to triple it now, as soon as the inlaws leave. Till they come I am cleaning except for the occasionally very brief break.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I am so glad that you have not lost your files.Phew.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I am so grateful you found your documents. This post made my stomach hurt.

Let me cosign that Word master documents are the devil. Most technical writers I know won't touch them, and have colorful explanations of just how much data they lost. Somehow they mysteriously lose all the information, and they've been doing that since before 1993 to my personal knowledge, and Microsoft has never bothered to track that one down.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

This is the first time I've had trouble with a wordperfect master document, and since I think I know how I made that mess and I have new spanking multiple copies everywhere, I have dared to create a new wordperfect master document in the wordperfect format, and it looks okay from here.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone who knows how these things works could explain that in fact the reason word master documents fail is the reason that my wordperfect one did this time. I believe that saving the master document in .rtf robbed the program of the ability to make links, and the label of the link ended up replacing the content of the subdocuments. So since word is constructed in a more elaborate and slapdash way (with layers of new gimmicks on top of old ones) I wouldn't be surprised if the master document function sometimes got interpreted in that way, as a replace function instead of a link.

But I am specualting from a position of not knowing very much about the back end of word processing programs, or any, for that matter.