While procrastinating the other day, I was messing around on the internet and stumbled across a thread on Reddit where a user was saying they had lost 20 pages worth of their book they were writing because of a Microsoft OneDrive problem, and that as a result they were giving up on writing because they'd "never be able to rewrite it as good as the original".
My initial reaction was to once again feel validated because of the large number of backups I make of my files. In addition to backing up to multiple cloud storage services, I also have backups on several physical storage media devices (USBs and external hard drives). While some folks might think I'm being anally retentive by having so many copies of my files, I've never lost more than about half a day's work, even with various file corruptions and hardware failures over the years.
Still, once I got over my moment of smugness, I remembered a 'data loss' incident I had during high school, though this was of the pen and paper variety. Back then, I did all my writing by hand, as I didn't have a computer. I would write rough drafts of my chapters on cheap notepad paper, and then once I revised them and was happy with them, I'd write the final version into an exercise book, which would then get passed around at school for my friends to read.
When I was about 10 or 11 chapters into that story, I lost the notepad drafts of my next chapter. After searching everywhere for several days, I became despondent, convinced that even if I rewrote it, it would be to a lower standard than the original. Eventually I realised that if I was going to finish the story, I had to rewrite that chapter, so I sat down and wrote out as much as I could from memory and then filled in the gaps with whatever I thought up at the time.
A few days after I finished the rewrite, I accidentally dropped the TV remote between our two armchairs, and when I fished it out, I also found the lost original draft of the chapter. At first I was elated that I hadn't lost my 'masterpiece', and I considered throwing away the new version I'd written, but then I decided to put them side by side and compare them.
Instead of being a pale imitation of the first draft, as I had expected, the second draft was significantly better than the original.
I suppose that after I'd written the first draft, the story and the ideas kept rattling around in my brain, so I was subconsciously still thinking about it and revising it. When I rewrote it, what came out was a more refined version. While I never ended up finishing that story, I do still sometimes find it useful, when a chapter or passage of what I'm writing isn't working, to put it away somewhere out of sight for a few days an then rewrite it from scratch. Often my subconscious seems to work on the problem while I'm doing other stuff, and by the time I rewrite it, many (if not all) of the issues I was struggling with end up being resolved in the second draft.
That being said, it's much less stressful to rewrite something from scratch because you chose to rather than because you lost the original, so I guess what I'm trying to say is...
Back up your shit.
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