I'm Really Wanting To Give Up Now

[teddy_radiator]

I just saved my first chapter of my exchange fic. Closed it. Tried to reopen it. The file is corrupted. I've lost it.

Someone is mad at me.

Comments

[kribu.livejournal.com]

Can you try and open the file in Notepad (or something similar)? Even if the file is corrupted, it's possible that the contents (or most of them) are salvageable.

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

I've tried both Notepad and wordpad. One comes up blank the other is just gibberish. It gives this baffling reason for the corruption in the details. I'm very not a happy camper right now. This is the third file I've had corrupted since I got this new 'puter.

[kribu.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That's unfortunate. Usually there's a bit of actual text in between all the gibberish. :-/

If it's a recurring problem, have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Word (or whatever you are using)? Not that this will help with this particular file.

I second tonksinger's suggestion, though - it's worth a try, anyway. Sometimes a file that doesn't work in one computer will miraculously open in another, although it's a long shot.

*hugs*

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

Thanks to you and Tonks. I'll send it to my beta to see if she has any joy. I use an external hard drive, and it worked great with my old laptop, but it doesn't like this new one at ALL. I think that is the trouble - it got corrupted going from the laptop to the external hd. I'll give anything a go at this point!

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

I use an external hard drive, and it worked great with my old laptop, but it doesn't like this new one at ALL. I think that is the trouble - it got corrupted going from the laptop to the external hd.

If that external HD was plugged into your old computer when it got fried, the HD might have gotten corrupted at the same time, especially if something was being backed up onto it, or read from it, at the time. You might want to try reinstalling the HD's driver software to see if that solves the problem.

I'd also save work to your new computer's HD for short term storage, and use the external drive for backup purposes only; the usual procedure is to just do incremental backups daily (presuming you are doing enough work on a daily basis to back up), and a full backup once a week.

IOW, you should have TWO copies of your file, one on your computer, and one on the external HD which may not be the most current, but gives you a (hopefully) recoverable copy with the next-to-last most recent changes, in case something happens to the copy on your computer.