Friday, June 27, 2014

I'm really trying to be philosophical about this.

In a fit of reorganization several weeks ago, inspired by the new organization for the book as a whole, I'd gone through my old files and put them all in a new order, deleting redundancies. Are the document summaries with the transcriptions? Yep, one for each one. Great. So this set of files is redundant and taking up space. Delete. Synchronize all backups.

Except it wasn't redundant. What that deleted set of files was, in fact, represented about six weeks of going through the files, collecting them together in rough groups and started to freewrite a bit about them, noting down things I'd have to track down, possible leads, random musings and the like. It was, in fact, the seeds of a book project, the absence of which I discovered today as I went to look for it to work on a chapter section.

And now it's gone. Completely, irrevocably gone.

As the post title says, I'm trying to be philosophical about this. This was all stuff I'd written up years ago, back when I had no idea where this was all going. And it's possible that these old, unformed thoughts might have dragged me back off the track I'm headed on right now. And I've still got the transcriptions and document summaries.

There's going to be a lot of work I'll need to redo, but I hold out the faint hope that something better will rise from the ashes, unencumbered by my earlier flailing. Really, right now, that hope is all that I've got to go on.

7 comments:

Janice said...

Aw, dang! Something similar happened when my laptop harddrive catastrophically failed almost four years ago. I lost a whole revised set of working files that had escaped the weekly back-up since I'd moved them out of the regular dropbox and never noticed. Now that the paper from that work is finally place in a volume that's in production, I can let go of the regrets, I think.

undine said...

Oh, no! It will be all the better for the rewriting, though.

Fie upon this quiet life! said...

Listen, there's a small chance you could get it back. Call your IT department and tell them that you accidentally deleted files because you thought that you didn't need them, and then ask if they can try to do a recovery. In many cases, recovery can happen. You just need to ask the right people. If you're working on your home computer and don't want to ask IT, sometimes the Best Buy guys can do this. Call around and see.

jo(e) said...

This is my worst nightmare. All kinds of sympathy from me.

Comradde PhysioProffe said...

Ouch. And agreed with Fie. But immediately stop using the computer the files were on. The more you use it, the better the chance that you'll overwrite the space on the hard drive that contains the deleted files.

Contingent Cassandra said...

Aargh! This makes me feel a bit better about the level of anxiety I experienced a couple of weeks ago when I realized that my supposedly-automatic cloud backup had stopped functioning a week or so earlier (it's now working again, but I was a bit surprised how vulnerable I felt without it).

That said, I suspect the argument that it may be better to work from where you are now after all has merit.

Notorious Ph.D. said...

Thanks, everyone. A small insight today has me headed toward the Comrade's solution: I do regular backups (Mac Time Machine) on an external hard drive for each of my computers when they prompt me, and it keeps copies of as many as it can until the hard drive is full, then starts overwriting the oldest ones. But because I haven't been spending much time at the office, I've only done one backup there this month. So there's a 50-50 chance that the pre-deletion version still exists there. I'm going to check first thing when I'm up later this week. In the meantime, I'm moving forward.