Has anyone successfully restore lost manuscripts? I lost 40K due to a hard drive failure, and I am starting the painful process of rewriting.
Any "been there, done that" stories?
Been there, didn't do that.
The first thing you should do is sit down and start recreating what you lost. You'll be surprised how much will come back, once you start writing.
Since having my computer wiped in a thunderstorm around 1998, I've had a regular backup schedule. Currently, I use a thumb driver and two external hard drives, one for each computer. Also, current files are backed up onto a Yahoo Group I created for the purpose.
Three months ago, my hard drive failed. Data Doctors had a look at it ($149 cost) and said it would cost $1300 to
attempt to recover the data. They explained the process to me, and I could see why it would cost that much, but it was still too rich for me, especially since there was no certainty of recovery.
My backup was a month old for business files, two months for personal photos, ebooks, etc. I had to recover the lost business files by scanning printed documents. I got most photos back from relatives and friends I'd shared them with. A thumb drive contained my current writing projects. So I lost just a few documents.
Now I have Carbonite ( carbonite.com ). For $55 a year, they back up everything dynamically, ie, every time you save a file, it's backed up to their servers, wherever they are (Leningrad? Tehran? Beijing?). Anyway, I've tested the system. When I accidentally overwrote an old invoice, I was able to recover the original file from Carbonite within two minutes.
Dangerous Bill