Awful luck (Part 1)

I've always been careful about backing up my work. I backed up everything to two separate HDDs in a storage tower attached to a surge suppressor, as well as uploaded to MS OneDrive. So, I knew everything was safe from power surges, floods, fire, and other disasters.

During my 10-year hiatus from writing/editing/promoting (2016-2026), I didn't worry about the files, secure in the knowledge that they were safe. When my laptop ran out of space, I double-checked that I had everything backed up before temporarily deleting from the laptop the writing folders and a bunch of other stuff I hadn't used in years.

Then my laptop started having problems, so I bought a new one. I still hadn't used those old files in years, so I didn't think about restoring them to my new laptop.

Eventually, (this June), I decided to resume writing. So I went to the first backup drive to restore the folders to my laptop. The drive was dead. Not corrupted. Dead. It wouldn't power on. It was a 14TB drive, with family photos and videos as well as my writings.

That sucked, but at least I had my second, 8TB, backup drive.

I went to access it and it, too, was dead. WTF? There was a third, unrelated, drive in the same tower, and it was fine. (Probably not a power surge, then.) Just the two drives with all my writing folders were dead.That sucked even more. But at least I had my online backup.

I went to restore the folders from there and saw a notice that my storage was full. I had ignored the many notifications that I was nearing capacity over the years. Worse, my files were nowhere to be found. I don't know what happened. They shouldn't have been deleted or written over, but they were gone anyway. Most likely I turned something off or on that I shouldn't have.

Whatever happened, the upshot was that everything I had written since 2003 was all gone. All my novels (five completed and two half-written); a dozen or so short stories; another dozen or so humorous, rhyming sci-fi poems; book covers; book trailers; and all the other marketing/promotional materials I had created or accumulated.oems, book covers, book trailers, and all the other marketing/promotional materials I had created or accumulated.

I scrambled to see if I had backed up anything, even draft versions, onto USB drives, other external hard drives, maybe even print-outs.

Nothing. Not a blessed thing. It was all gone.

The only thing I could think of was to send the drives to a data recovery lab to see if they could retrieve anything from the drives. I knew it could be pricey, but what other option was there?

I contacted a company and mailed them the drives. After waiting for several weeks, they got back to me.

They were able to get into the drives. (One was 10 years old and the other was 8. Ouch!) They determined that the partitions were corrupted. They might be able to restore the partitions, but maybe not. If not, they would have to do a sector by sector rebuild, but then the files would have no names, may not even be whole files. And oh, by the way, it would cost $2,438 per drive, plus tax, to do the work.

As much as I wanted to recover all those files, $5,000??? I just couldn't justify it. I had sold tens of thousands of copies of my books in 2014-2018, but once I stopped actively promoting them, the sales had dried up. There was no guarantee I would sell enough books to cover that $5K even if I went through all the hassle of recovering the partitions, possibly having to scroll through millions of sectors looking for pieces of files and then putting them back together, like a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle. In the end, I decided against it.

So what next? See Part 2.