I had a lot of T ideas for today and hadn’t settled on one yet, though I had narrowed it down to Theme or Tradition.  My youngest son and his family are here tonight and I wanted to keep it short so I could visit with them, so I decided to write on Theme, which wouldn’t require any research.

I opened my famous flash drive, which is already in the computer, to get started.

But instead of opening it, my computer gave me a pretty blue pop-up containing an error message:

Location is not available.  E:/ is not accessible.  The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

What?

I sat there staring at the words and felt like Woody in Toy Story.  You know, that part where he goes, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no” in utter despair.  I’m not sure why he does that—I don’t remember—but I know it can’t have been over anything as bad as this.

Tried again.  Same result.

And again.  Same.

Tried removing the flash drive.  The computer says it’s in use.  It’s not, but I’m going to get this posted before I mess around with it any further.

The good news:  I did back up my Novel folder last week.

The bad news:  I did not back up the Blog folder.  All of my blog stuff—all of it—is gone.  All my plans and ideas, not just for my A-Z blogs but all blog posts past present and future, are in that folder.

I also did not back up the Research folder, the Journal folder, the Old Drafts folder, or any other folders.

So yeah.  Today’s post is T is for Total Disaster.  I can’t believe something like this could happen twice in one month.  I can’t believe I was foolish enough not to back everything up.

LEARN FROM ME.  PLEASE.

(Does anyone know how to recover a corrupt flash drive?  That’s a trick I don’t know.)