Published writer here. My main file got corrupted somehow and lost a HUGE ass chuck of my 170k word novel

Send me the drive or entire machine and I will retrieve as much of it as is technologically possible.

Tell me how, I'll do it myself. It's on an android device. Yesterday I made the most editing and writing, it's been a full day and today I wanted to do the last touches.
I want to recover my file. The .docx file went from a few hundred kbs to 0. Just like that, for basically no reason.

No other file has been affected as far as I know.

You should have been backing it up every time you finished a session.

if its that important always keep a backup.

You just gotta reset your perspective, dude.

Consider this an opportunity to rewrite the ideas. It’s like you were forced to edit the entire thing. You still have every single tool you needed to write the thing: your brain, your talent, etc. It is all okay.

I once wrote a two-act play only to lose it all suddenly in a similar way. Just consider this an opportunity to write something better.

Don’t listen to anyone here, either. None of them can even fucking write.

I would say scrap it entirely and start the same novel over again. If you keep what little you have left and work on that, you'll feel like chasing a ghost, or that the previous edition was better. If you scrap it all, and start fresh, you can probably do a better job than first time and in half the time.

If it makes you feel better, Dostoveysky almost finished the Brother's Karamazov, but he consider the work poor, so he through everything he had written into the fire. He started anew.

Same with Master and Margharita by Bulgakov. He burned it sometime in the 30's or 40's. Then rewrote it later.

Learn to let go of transient things. If you lost something that means it wasn't firm enough to serve as a foundation for your character.

if you're published, you should know better than trying to write a 170k novel.

You'll need to do a Gutmann pass on your empty disk space, it'll scan the empty space and find any recoverable data, then you can use damn near any recovery software to get it back

How many words is Ulysses though? Or like a typical 300 page novel?

300 pages is about 75-80k. 170k words would make a roughly 700 page book.

Nobody got time for that.

I have a similar experience when I play video games. I was playing on a PSP, and I dropped it while playing near the very end of a hard dungeon. The disk popped out, and I would have to redo the entire thing. Even though I was doing the exact same activity I just did, it wasn't fun, because it felt like work instead of exploration or progress.

You should take a break and try it again after your feelings go away. It'll probably be better the second time.

Ulysses is about 264,861 words. Longer novels used to be much more common, nobody publishes them anymore, however.

They only way you'll get a 110K novel published these days is if you already have a big name in the industry and a proven sales record.

Once it gets over 100k or so, most publishers would much rather just split the book up into a series.

Most novels are around 80-90k

wait, who the fuck writes their novel on a tablet? This can't be real

>I backed it all up a week
you act like some text file is huge and it''s such a hassle to make a backup every day, or just save it into a dropbox folder and everytime you hit save it will be auto backed up with version control. if you're too stupid to figure this stuff out or just too lazy your writing is probably stupid and fucking lazy, so no one will care what you lost tbqh.

>not leaving paintings on caves for the next generation

>writing on your phone
your fucking phone? what the fuck user...

>Published writer
>Doesn't bother backing up the work that feeds him
>Smart

Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it for a couple of seconds then let it out of your mouth.

Okay, take a day or two to think it over, the story so far, reflect on it then sit down in front of your laptop and start again, this time correct mistakes or spice it up.

You needed to finish the rest anyway right? So it's not like you wouldn't still be working. Take this as an opportunity to make it better.

>mfw I backup everything I write on three different storage devices compulsively

My ex was a teacher and I used to watch her lose stuff like lesson plans etc all the time because of technical errors. Won't happen to me!

>not even using a pen drive as a buckup once a week
weew lad cool story

>not saving it on onedrive or googledocs, even as a back up

same but with 2 pen drives kek

100k+ novels were never easy to publish. In the past, actually, most books were splited in small fragments just like you said.

I'm totally stealing this pic.

Op take note

>phone
Mate you fucked up from the start

>he doesn't own two electric typewriters, six fountain pens, a dozen empty journals, and a lettera 32 because muh cormac mccarthy

Came in here to post this.

Start a new story that picks up some time after where your previous one left off, writing your data loss into the story as a cataclysmic event that shaped the history of the world in which you have woven

>Published writer here.
Stoped reading right there, official larp thread activated ladies and gentlemen.

>daily reminder that carlyle's maid used his manuscript of the french revolution as kindling and he wrote it not just better than before, but better than anyone since
you'll be fire

George RR Martin...is that you?

Dostoevsky burnt the Brothers K a few weeks before his creditor was about to take all his profits, and he wrote the 2nd greatest novel of all time, you got this

Brainlet