thesecretdoor

Just to let you guys know I'm still alive!


( Click for a short ramble/explanation... )

To all of my wonderful readers...I'm sorry to announce I'll be going on hiatus for a while.

The simple explanation being that all the fanfiction I've written has been deleted, and since for several (stupid) reasons I didn't have a back-up...basically - it's all gone. I'm completely devasted by this and right now I can't even think about trying to re-write it...so until my motivation comes back, I'm afraid I don't have antything to share with you.

To all of you that have been following Baby Blue up until now - Thank you all so much for all of the support you've given me! I definitely am NOT giving up on this fic...but since I've just lost the next 8 chapters, I'm completely at a loss at how to even begin trying to re-write it. I will definitely do it, but please be patient with me, right now I'm still a little distressed about it so I can't say for sure how long it will take to get back to writing it.

To yukitsubute and lilly0 - I still owe you both fics from the fund-raising fic events. These are my first priority - they were both in progress but I've lost all the work done so far on them. I'm really, really sorry for taking so long getting your fics to you, and hopefully I'll be able to get these completed soon!


Firstly I should point out that I keep all of my writing hidden (unecessarily securely) in an encypted vault (along with videos/images that I'd rather not keep just laying around on my laptop) that can only be opened using a particular program.

My boyfriend has been bugging me for months about switching from using Windows to using Linux, and because my laptop has been running slowly (partly due to not having enough space left on it) I finally agreed to make the switch-over. Most of my important videos and things were backed up anyway, but my boyfriend, deciding to be helpful, went ahead and backed up everything else on my laptop while I was at work. And he pointed out that he'd been through all the folders where programs sometimes save stuff sneakily to make sure he'd gotten everything...you can see where this is going right?

It was only after my laptop had been wiped and linux put on that I remembered to double check that the particular program works fine on linux and will be able to open my vault properly. He says that it will, but then casually asks "That vault was saved in your documents folder right?" to which I reply "How would I know? You set it up...I only open it through the program...you did make a back-up right?"

So we check the back-up files, and as you can guess it's not there...for some reason it got saved in some obscure location you wouldn't even think to look in.

At that point I got rather upset (which sounds pretty childish I know, but not only were there 8 chapters of baby blue on there and the two fics I was writing for the fund-raiser. There were also two other oneshots, as well as three other multichapters [2 of which I'd written 9 chapters of around 3000 words of, and the onther I'd written 4 chapters of around 4500 words of] which all in all is a heck of a lot of work).

Of course he felt really guilty about it since he knows how much time and effort I've put into them, and it genuinely was just a mistake. So he stayed up until half 5 in the morning running recovery programs to try and rescue it, and then he spent another few hours after getting very little sleep, trying to get it back. The good news is that he did manage to recover most of my hard-drive (which was pretty impressive since it had been formatted once while installing linux, and then again when he had to re-install windows so that he could run the recovery program). The bad news is that while the recovered data showed the vault and could even tell us how many folders and such were in it...the data itself couldn't be read.

He'd told me from the start it was a very slim chance we'd get it back, but it was still devastating to have it confirmed, after hours of trying, that there was absolutley nothing left we could do. It seems the main problem was that, as you would expect from a program designed to encrypt data really well, the vaults are designed to practically destroy themselves when deleted (after all, if you've gone to the trouble of hiding something so well, chances are if you delete it you don't want someone else to then be able to retrieve the data), so really it was hopeless from the start.

And as if all that wasn't bad enough anyway - I had to delete 35GB of videos from my back-up files in order to make room for the recovered data which turned out to be useless...on the plus side my laptop isn't running out of space anymore!

For now, the task of trying to rebuild my little worlds is just too daunting, but I really do love writing, and the support you've all given me is just fuel on the fire, so hopefully it won't take too long until I can face trying to re-write my fics.

Really, I can only blame myself for not making sure my fics were backed up properly...it was a pretty harsh lesson but there's nothing to be done about it now. Anyway, sorry for the long rant.


Thank you again for all your support up until now, hopefully I'll see you soon!