I’m going to share something very personal this week. It’s about suffering setbacks. Recently this happened to me in a very profound way. It affected everything in my life.

The last week of April was exciting, I took my computer to my son, and we replaced the motherboard, processor, RAM, and graphics card. We replaced everything except for my hard drives. Son suggested I get an SSD drive to run everything as my current hard drives were in good shape but had many hours on them.

So on the way home, Mr. V and I stopped by Best Buy to pick up new SSD drives, one for his machine and one for mine. The migrations software with the new SSD on his machine went swimmingly. I followed the directions and Ta-Da! Mr. V’s machine was starting up lightning fast.

The problem seemed to be my machine. The migration software wasn’t working. In fact, my motherboard seemed to forget that there was a boot drive on it. No worries. It was just the new drive that wasn’t working (I thought at the time).

After putting the new drive on Mr. V’s computer and wiping it, I decided to try installing windows without the migration software off of a thumb drive. Yay! I got windows on it and could migrate my data over manually. Knowing it would take a long time, I started downloading my most used programs onto the new drive.

Partway through this procedure, windows errored out and restarted. Upon the restart, the motherboard once again could not find a boot drive. Figuring at this point, the SSD must be faulty, I removed it and attempted to start the computer with my previous C drive. My machine didn’t recognize it.

It was at this point I was starting to get worried about my Works in Progress file. That is one file I keep everything I’m currently working on.
Shutting down my machine, I took both the C drive and backup F drive out and put them on Mr. V’s computer.

No dice, the computer couldn’t even find the drives. For shits and giggles, I attempted to see if the SSD would show up. Wouldn’t you know that it did show? Now my two mechanical hard drives with all my information from my personal planner, three books I’ve finished but not edited, fanfiction, short stories, graphics works, otome projects, editorial calendars, social media postings, blogging calendar was on two bricked hard drives.

Both my working drive and my backup had compromised. (I also had a third external drive, but I admit I hadn’t backed up to it since 3/2020). We have since tried other methods of recovery, and nothing has been successful as of yet.

I’ve started the process of recreating everything that was gone, but it’s going to take time.

Some of my writer friends said if it happened to them, they would quit. I admit this has been mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting. But I refuse to let this stop me. I’ll recreate everything from scratch again if need be. Still, it’s a daunting thought to redo everything.

I admit it’s challenging, but I’m trying to look at it as an opportunity to make my writing and my productivity better.

I’ve started by going online and saving the things I can. Thankfully some stuff like my planner templates in image form is online. My previous fanfictions are also there, and I’ve been able to get downloads of my last book Deliberate Deception and my upcoming book, Abducted, from files online.

It’s a start. I’m also looking into a data recovery company, but it might not be a feasible endeavor with the file amount. Not to mention I don’t have my computer. Thankfully Mr. V was willing to let me use his until I have a running machine again.

I know my issues are first-world problems, but it isn’t any less disheartening when everything you’ve worked for is just gone. Setbacks fucking suck! Whether it’s data loss, injury, illness, theft, it all hurts. Anything that stifles your carefully considered plans can be emotionally, physically, and mentally draining. Do setbacks stop you in your tracks? Do you find a workaround? Or do you plow straight through it and carry on?