With the exception of the few snippets I have posted here in the forums, I have lost the entirety of Chapter 11 of Dear Sweet Kani-sama. 
The reason this happened was due to a glitch in FocusWriter that prevents it from properly saving to the original file - for the last two or three months, FocusWriter has been using only the cached copies of the files in my personal AppData folder. I was not able to recover it due to an undocumented feature of FocusWriter: it only maintains cached copies of the last five sessions. And once I discovered the discrepancy, I went on a spree trying to find the lost data, inadvertently burying it.
I've already tried an undelete, but it's too late. There have already been far too many rewrites to that part of the hard disk.
The one good thing is that the new version of FocusWriter is safe to use - I was in direct email-communication with Graeme Gott, the creator of FocusWriter, who was very helpful in at least figuring out what happened.
Of course, I'm also going to be busy rewriting Chapter 11. This might be for the best, anyhow, because in this chapter I've had to struggle through some nasty writer's block and I never really felt quite satisfied with some parts.
The reason this happened was due to a glitch in FocusWriter that prevents it from properly saving to the original file - for the last two or three months, FocusWriter has been using only the cached copies of the files in my personal AppData folder. I was not able to recover it due to an undocumented feature of FocusWriter: it only maintains cached copies of the last five sessions. And once I discovered the discrepancy, I went on a spree trying to find the lost data, inadvertently burying it.
I've already tried an undelete, but it's too late. There have already been far too many rewrites to that part of the hard disk.
The one good thing is that the new version of FocusWriter is safe to use - I was in direct email-communication with Graeme Gott, the creator of FocusWriter, who was very helpful in at least figuring out what happened.
Quote:Oh no! That's awful!
FocusWriter saves to regular files, not temporary files. It also keepscopies of the files for the last five times it was opened, so--unlessyou have opened it repeatedly after this issue arose--there should bebackup copies located here:
%APPLOCALDATA%GottCodeFocusWriterCache
Second, you should upgrade as soon as possible. There was a data lossbug fixed in 1.5.5 that might be related to your issue.
Also, are the files themselves empty? Or did they just open that way?
Regards,Graeme Gott
Quote:No, the files were not empty. It was simply as though it had stopped saving to the files at a certain point.
I just checked the folder in question. No luck - I went in a spree trying to find the missing data. I'm going to have to try for a file recovery and see if it can't be undeleted. Even if I only get part of what I'm missing, it's better than nothing. Thanks for the clue, though.
And I'll definitely get that newer version.
Sincerely,Benjamin Rhodes
Quote:I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything else tosuggest. I hope you have luck with the file recovery!I'm going to suggest to him that people have the option to let FocusWriter create archives of sessions going back as far as the user wishes - perhaps make that part of the initial setup. Text files of the sort used by FocusWriter don't use much hard disk space. It'd be probably be possible to record six months of industrious work in this manner and barely even use a hundred megabytes of disk space. This could even be used in another feature that would allow someone to make a side-by-side comparison of previous work and newer work.
Regards,Graeme Gott
Of course, I'm also going to be busy rewriting Chapter 11. This might be for the best, anyhow, because in this chapter I've had to struggle through some nasty writer's block and I never really felt quite satisfied with some parts.