That you’ve just never have been any more depressed in your life when you accidently overwrite a 35 page doc file of reflection of your previous year in FIRST you wrote about a week ago?
That’s how I feel. 
Don’t worry - the source of that paper’s content hasn’t gone anywhere. You didn’t pour it out of you onto the pages, only to be accidentally lost forever; you simply replicated your feelings and imprinted them in the paper. That, you can certainly do again, probably even more eloquently and thoroughly than the first time around!
But you can also use this as a learning experience. Save early, save often, and save in multiple locations, preferably on different storage media.
I don’t have any replicas of what i was trying to wrote. digitaly, realisticly. Nothing! Capput! and i have no idea how I will re-write it…
Don’t try and re-write it.
Instead, write it again … fresh and new. The feelings, emotions, and words are still within you, just let them flow freely and let them inspire you.
Just so that you don’t have this problem again, note that Word has an option to save a backup file (Tools | Options | Save | Always create backup copy), and another option to save versions (File | Versions).
Well there was the 4-5 pages of dense conference paper material that I hadn’t saved that Open Office decided to choke on. And try to recover. And choke on. And try to recover. And choke on. Luckily I managed to recover it manually after an hour of wrestling with it or so, but still.
Uhmmm, yeah. It is very similar to the feeling you get when you hear the hard drive with the one and only copy of eleven years worth of your research data start going “gggrrrrcccchhhrrruuuunnnccchhhhh!.” It is similar to the feeling that you get when you realize you just heard the sound of your entire grad school career being trashed, and you drop out of grad school for a decade because it takes that long to work up the internal will to start all over again. It is very similar to the feeling that makes you smack yourself really, really hard in the forehead for not listening to all those stories about horrific disk drive failures, and thinking that “it will never happen to me,” and failing to learn from the mistakes of others.
Please, nobody make the same error. Learn from these mistakes. Backup your work - often.
-dave
And now you know why Dave uses a Mac…
(not that they’re any less prone to disc failure)
I just remembered that people wanted me to tell them how the rewriting of my essay went.
Well, I’ve completed it after a week and a few days, the amount of pages were the same as the last version, except that in the last version I was missing one subject in the essay which I haven’t finished it. In the new one I finished it and it was about 9 pages for the single subject.
All in all, I feel that the new version is much mroe advanced and professinal, in the terms that I was able to express myself better and correctly. I’m proud of my 34 page essay about my review of the FIRST project last season! 
I’d upload the file, but it’s in hebrew, sorry.
Thanks for the encourgment all! Doubt I would’ve done it again without you. 
Gratz on the Paper, i hope you think its much better then the last!
Good Luck
Wonder how hard it would be to find a translator in the CD/FIRST community…
I would love to read your paper and I’m sure others would, too.
–
The loss has become your gain in that you found you cared enough to write again and that the final results are improved. Congratulations on sticking with it.
Jane
That is great. You can do this with software too !!
Write a neat C program to do something. Then throw it completely away and do it again from memory. It will make you a better writer, or coder.
:yikes: uhh…heh, that might be quite a challenge. :yikes:
I can work on translating it soon. Got a holiday coming up with lots of free time, so if you guys want, I’ll do it!
My condolences, but perhaps it is better that you learn the importance of back up copies with this document, rather than one of great commercial value for an employer or design that you are working on in the future.
As a teacher I occasionally have students ignore my oft-repeated lectures on the importance of back-ups, only to loose a file they have spent weeks preparing, and I can only advise them that if the only lesson they ever remember from my course is to make back-ups, then their time in the class was probably worthwhile.
It isn’t a complete loss if you’ve learned something,
Jason