Sunflower Crown | account & me

back. up. your. books.

So today, for the first time in a very long time I wandered into my completed stories files searching for a description. I was planning on writing a oneshot featuring Sophie and Dulce's relationship (for those of you that are PWF series fans) and I wandered into the folder and found absolutely freaking nothing.

Yes, you read that right. My descriptions, my plot, my chapters, my writing. Gone.

Did I delete those? Um, absolutely not. I haven't touched them in ages. I'm not sure how they would just delete on their own, but I guess not even Word is safe.

I went wandering through my other folders in a panic, and found out that five of my works had been deleted, all of my oldest ones. Five. Whole. Books.

Am I pissed? Absolutely.

Thank god that I have all of my work uploaded in various places on the internet, otherwise I would for sure be completely screwed. I backed up a few of my more recent works, but not those ones, and for some reason, Word decided that it was going to delete those ones.

Writing a book is like running a marathon. Losing an entire book is like all of your muscle and hard work and dies where your sweat might've been tears is gone and all for nothing. I know it's not necessarily respected in the same way, but I respect it in the same way. And there goes five freaking books.

Actually, six if you think about it. I've got one really old one that I posted on a different site (not worth reading, full of plot holes, don't even ask for it, I'm not giving it to you) and that was a really easy copy and paste because I wrote it as one post and just updated the one post and then notified readers.

I copy and pasted the file back into the folder, I just will never have it properly formatted again unless I want to spend hours of my life retyping the entire thing.

I lowkey might cry. I haven't yet, but there's a definite chance that I might.

It's so scary to think about the fact that had I not posted my work online for feedback both on Wattpad and the one other site, I could have lost everything forever. After this, I'm not only uploading everything to google docs but I'm definitely also going to be investing in a hard drive, so that if the internet ever completely fails me I'll have something.

This entire thing - I just can't. Where I'm at it's literally like 11 PM and I'm exhausted. This is just...unbelievable. I'm kind of over here like you've got to be kidding.

Maybe that's why. It hasn't fully hit me yet. Lovely, I can just start crying tomorrow in the middle of class instead when it hits then.

I'm sorry, I'm dramatic. But you would be too if you were a writer and had your books completely deleted.

It's just going to be a long weekend of my uploading work off of this site and hoping that I didn't loose too many edits. I've never been so thankful to have posted my work to Wattpad in my entire life. Bless.

So, yeah. Moral of the story is that even if you've done nothing at all and are using what you judge as a trustworthy source, if you want to keep that stuff you better back it all up before it's gone and you can't get it back. I recommend a hard drive and like two different places online to have your work stored. Don't let this happen to you - as you can see by this completely angry/terrified post, it's not pretty.