I received some bad news yesterday. My OneDrive cannot be restored. It's gone.
While not posting, I've been writing 'erotica' since the mid-90s (yes, I'm that old). Several years ago, I transferred all my story notes and partially written stories to OneDrive because I figured 'it's in the cloud; it can't fail'.
Well, the cloud can't fail... but I can. Evidently, according to the engineers I spoke with, I did this to myself. Something I did while installing the operating system for my new PC caused IT to become the master and sync up to the OneDrive slave, basically clearing out everything. I don't remember doing the things they said but...
And to think, I PAID for them to tell me what I already knew... namely, the storage was gone because of my new computer...
I've lost a lot. Pictures from the past 20 years or so (luckily, my wife copies many of them to her storage device - you have to love my wife, she's a luddite who has never trusted 'the cloud' - so I've not lost everything but...) are gone. Hundreds, if not thousands, of stories and story ideas in various stages of completion - gone.
Typically, I'll have a story idea that I think is cool. If it sticks with me for more than a few days, I'll even write it down, flesh it out, write out characters and so on. If I like it enough at the time, I'll even start writing the story's first few scenes, just to get enough of a feel that when I go back, I can remember where I was going.
From time to time, I'll come back to the idea and flesh it out some more. Sometimes, I'll merge two or more stories into one, if the plots merit it. If I get to a point where I feel the plot is good enough, I might continue it to completion - that is where Runesward came from. The beginning idea for the story actually came to me somewhere in the mid-aughts (and it's actually merged from three different story ideas). A decade and a half later or so, and I'm writing the second book.
I'm going to be downloading my stories from SOL today, and then I'll try to re-create my notes from the stories. It's going to take a while so my most sincere apologies...