Whatever You Write, Make Sure You Back It Up and Not Make the Mistake I Made

 I had a problem this week with saving my work in progress. I lost three chapters. 

I’ve been working with Microsoft OneNote to write my book on my smartphone. This week I discovered just how problematic that can be when I tried to highlight text in my document to edit. 

What I ended up doing was inadvertently deleting three entire chapters and I couldn’t get them back because the latest edit was saved and I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve it from my phone  

I ended up having to recreate the chapters. I’m glad it was just three chapters and not the entire document.

I discovered that just because my edits are made in the cloud, doesn’t mean they’re safety backed up. Since the app interface is different on my phone than it is on my computer, I didn’t have the ability to retrieve my previously saved version. Then I became concerned that if I continued to make edits on my phone, I’d lose my entire document because of another blunder and end up back at square one. 

So I used my ridiculously slow laptop to get the functionality I wanted and made a copy of the full document. 

I’m still composing my work on my smartphone, but now, I’m highlighting and copying only my new edits and pasting them to the backup copy one chapter at a time.

I’m still working in the cloud, but I’m doing it more prudently.