Look! Clouds!
Up until Sunday morning, I didn’t really know what the iCloud was. I just thought it was some weird new feature on my Apple devices, and that I’d never need to know. Apple is all the time putting new features and updates that I’ll never use. When I first got my laptop and it asked me if I wanted to activate it, I thought, sure, why not…
On Saturday, I had quite a bit of downtime at work. Saturdays tend to be slow, so I was prepared with my iPad, and thought I’d get some writing done. The novel is (finally) going spectacularly well, so I managed to get quite a bit done. For some reason, I decided to sync my iPad on Sunday morning. When the warning message came up on the screen, something about things on my iPad that weren’t on my laptop, I just sort of clicked the “whatever” button and let it go.
When I realized that ALL MY DOCUMENTS HAD BEEN DELETED FROM MY IPAD, I cried. I literally sat down and cried, and tried to convince myself that it wasn’t tragic, but that was pretty hard to do when I further realized that I hadn’t synced my iPad since August. Of 2011. I lost a year’s worth of stuff, which was important, but nowhere near as important as losing the updates to my novel.
Now, I didn’t lose that much of the novel, maybe a couple thousand words, but it really felt like someone had deliberately harmed me. I was ready to throw my iPad in the trash, even though I knew it was all my own fault.
My husband asked a few questions that made me want to smack him, and then the one that saved the day… “Do you have iCloud?”
It turns out that my iPad automatically updates to the cloud whenever it’s on a Wifi network, and ALL MY DOCUMENTS were there. Every last one of them. I swear, the angels sang.
I’d like to say I learned something from this. Like maybe not to be so careless, or not to ignore warning messages.
But I hate to lie.
So I’ll just say I’m happy to have my documents back where they belong. Now, back to my novel. 🙂
Doree Weller 