Learning to Write Again (Is Really Freaking Hard) / Help - Comments

@ Hina;
I was thinking about setting a set amount of words everyday, which I know won't always be possible because life, but it's worth a shot. I've been good at writing a little something every day in the past few days. Even if it's generic and not the best or whatever. Some writing is better than no writing, yeah? I've been using Google Docs thankfully! I'm now wishing (sigh) that I had uploaded all my writing there that I had online but I just never thought my laptop would crash so "soon" (ha, I meant to back it all up yearsss ago). Google Docs is definitely a lifesaver. I'm also posting a lot of finished small pieces to my Tumblr account as well, which is good motivation.

@ PoeticMess.
I don't get why hard drives have to be so mean and crash on us. :( It's so rude. We're so loyal to them. To bad the can't be said for them. ;) I have found other scraps I'd put on Google Docs way back in '11, interestingly enough, I didn't think to transfer anything recent. Writing something new is definitely the best thing to do. No use in trying to rewrite the small pieces of writing I had. I've been having my vague ideas come to mind, which is good.

I always meant to do iCloud on my Mac, but I didn't have an external hd for a long time and then I did and (surpriseeeee) it went missing (stolen). I'm learning to save everything now.

I've lost things too. I keep everything on my laptop, but with my old laptop, the entire hard drive crashed and I lost everything I'd ever worked on up until that point. I was able to get some back from an old backup I saved on a friend's hard drive years ago, but I lost years worth of stuff. The hardest part was trying to rewrite what I lost. My advice is to try to write something new, that way you don't feel like you're trying to remember exactly what you had before.

Also, as for backing things up. I save my entire documents folder to iCloud, as well as onto a flash drive. For the important things, I upload them to Google Docs and keep duplicates there. It absolutely sucks when we lose writing, so we have to be vigilant. I also have autosave turned on on my Mac, so it saves a "ghost" copy every couple of minutes, that way if the app crashes or my computer dies, I'll be able to open up the autosave file and save it for real.

all i can say is write a set amount of words a day, whether it's just planning a story or a simple drabble (or a the beginnings of a small story). And write or type all of your ideas down. I would say use google documents is a good way because no matter if your computer crashes or gets broken/dropped, you can always log into your gmail account and your google documents will still be there.

@ Ghoul Scouts
I just made an addenum (frozen computer at the library, the irony). I used to always type everything and then I just...stopped. Sigh.

That's why I keep everything on the computer, and make back up copies of the saved files. I'm so disorganized with stuff like notebooks.