The question a client rang and asked me a few minutes ago. I have several clients who are authors and this gentleman is one of them. He’s written for TV programs and now he’s writing a book. In my experience authors are great at writing – but they rarely stop to wonder what would happen if their computer breaks or some other mishap occurs.
Today the question was asked because, by the sound of it, my client had accidentally hit Ctrl+A (highlighted all the document) and then immediately pressed Ctrl+S to save the document. Once content on your document has been highlighted, pressing any key on the keyboard results in the highlighted text being deleted. In this case that was all of it! The result? He’d save a blank document. It’s contents had gone, so he panicked and turned off the computer.
If this happens to you. DON’T PANIC. If you turn off the computer you lose the chance to retrieve your data. Don’t press every key in sight in the hope that something will happen. Take a few deep breaths, calm down and then look for the “undo” icon. It’s there in most word-processors and it’s your friend. Clicking on undo will usually (with a few exceptions) undo whatever you last did – even if you have no idea what you’ve done.
If my client had done this, he would have got his text back. As it is he saved a blank document and then turned of his computer.
Disaster? Not totally. He has two laptops and a trusty memory stick. I have long since frightened him into copying everything he has worked on each day onto the memory stick and THEN copying it all onto the second laptop. That way both laptops have the same document on and he can’t inadvertently make one lot of changes on one computer and another set of changes on the other computer.
He had a copy of the book he was writing that he had saved yesterday and copied onto his memory stick. He’s lost what he wrote today, but still has a copy of what he had written previously.
He now fully understands the value of backups and will have to spend tomorrow rewriting what he’d already written today!