What's the most work you've ever lost?

30,000 words, due to hard-drive failure. I ended up re-writing it from scratch.

I now meticulously back up everything I write.

I lost about 90,000 words once. It was awful. I could only imagine what you felt triceretops.

I lost six screenplays, a novel, numerous short stories, journals I kept since I was 14, and a bunch of artwork. I didn't have a computer, so the writing was in long hand or typewritten. It included my first completed screenplay, and the novel I had been writing since I was 18. I kept it in a rubberneck and one day my ex decided to be an ass because he was pissed at me, and he took the whole thing to the dump. I didn't write for years after that. I still don't draw.

I condensed the novel down into a short story but other than that I haven't attempted to recreate anything else.

Earlier this year, when my hard drive crashed, I thought I'd lost a lot of my recent work-I had some things online. But I figured out how to retrieve the information from my external. Yay.

gothicangel said:

A whole novel [100,000 words] thanks to a corrupted floppy disk. And no, I didn't have a back up, and an agent had just made a request for a full.

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Argh nooooo, noooo.

I just cringed and twitched a bit over that.

You poor thing!

I lost an entire folder of poetry and short stories to a computer crash. Every. Single. One.

I also lost some of my world building research...it just mysteriously disappeared from the main file, never to be found again.

I back up to three separate locations--two of them online--every time I finish writing for the day.

I would be upset to even lose a page. I'm not a fast writer.

the worst: 88 pages of my first novel. i lost them when a lightning storm fried my brand new gateway computer the week i bought it. --anyone remember gateways? i did get a new computer out of it and the novel did survive on legal pads in a trunk. i did eventually finish it. it is called fruit salad and wings and will be coming out in november.

second worst: rough drafts for a couple of short stories. really don't know what went wrong that time--my screen turned into lines of little gray dots. the tech guy at school managed to save most of my hard drive but the thing i was working on and one other were gone. i didn't have any paper back ups that time. also lost my screensaver--a photo of my late husband in his twenties. it just wasn't there any more. strange. i do have the original snapshot... somewhere, but that was the heart breaker--s6

I've never "lost" anything.

I threw out 3 years worth of writing when I left Iceland.

Several times back when I didn't have a hard drive, and the only copy was on a floppy disk and if that got corrupted and I hadn't printed out yet.... Youngsters today don't realize how lucky we have it because of this:

Long story short, I now have copies saved in three different places - the computer, a memory stick, and on Dropbox. This will never happen to me again.

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And I threw away the only hard copy of a novel before there was such a thing as e-publishers or self-publishing on kindle, and it got good responses from editors back then...should have kept it. Maybe I'd have made a couple grand off it today. Ah well, dem's the breaks.

I've referenced it before, but in the Oakland Fire of ?2001? Maxine Hong Kingston, a slow writer, lost her newly completed novel. And her house and everything she owned. More info on that loss is on the wikipedia page for her.

I recently lost the notes I had made for my next book. It was disappointing, but not devastating. I took the notes on Penultimate for the iPad. But then dropped my iPad and had to get it replaced. I backed everything up, but apparently it didn't save the different notebooks I had in Penultimate. Lesson learned for that

I do still remember most of the ideas so I should be able to recreate, though I know I'm missing a few plot points.

All my actual drafts I throw into dropbox about once a week or whenever I reach a particular milestone. I haven't needed it yet, but it's good to know it's there for when I do.

I've probably only lost a few hundred words at a time, although I did throw about a couple hundred poems in a fit of housecleaning once because I wasn't sure I would ever be willing to sit down and transcribe them.

I currently have my entire writing collection saved in Dropbox, which means I also have copies of every file on two different computers. And occasionally (very rarely) I back it up to a flash drive, just for kicks.

About 2k of a chapter once.

But that is nothing compared to what others on this thread have lost.

The most work I've ever lost was probably my job as an insurance agent. But I was actually glad to lose it. 50 hours a week of work sucked.

Oh, wait. That probably wasn't what you meant.

I once lost a huge hunk of a novel I'd been working on for two years... and it's literally LOST. As in, I KNOW I have it somewhere and, in fifty years I'll probably stumble across it, but a HUGE search of all the boxes in the garage, attic, and storage did not reveal the hardcopy and I STILL don't know where I stuck that dang harddrive! It's probably under my bed or in my sex toys junk drawer or something. I think the most frustrating part is that I know Ima find it someday... after I've already finished that story!