Gone!

I had some work I’d committed to doing for my children’s school to get completed.   With the fevers and school days being missed and the other commitments I had this past week I wasn’t able to get to it until today.  It was what I’d call, “fun” work because it was moving lots of data around across multiple spreadsheets.

Fun, you might be asking?  I can’t explain it, but it’s like putting things into order from disarray.  I like working in spreadsheets.  There was raw data I needed to analyze for our annual fund drive, sorting families into buckets of past contribution or perhaps into hopeful future contribution.   It was annoying, it was tedious and yet it was somehow satisfying.

I worked for I suppose three hours today and had everything finally completed.   I made a backup of the spreadsheet to a second file and was about to send an email as I closed out the reference spreadsheets and then the main and backup files.   I got some strange prompt about “active page” and did I want to save it.  I said yes and cleared my desktop.  

As I was getting ready to send the email I opened the main file again to confirm all eleven of my “bucket” sheets were there and I found it was all gone.   The only thing remaining was the first sheet which contained my notes.   Gone.   All of it.   I was confused, but not worried because there was a recovery option, only the recovery option was greyed out.   What had happened?

Then I discovered I’d been working in .csv files the entire time.   The database exported the raw data into “Comma Separated Value” (CSV) data instead of Excel files.   These .csv weren’t capable of storing more than one page and since I didn’t convert the files when I agreed to “save the active sheet” I was agreeing to throw away all the other data.

Three hours of work was well and truly gone.  I’m not sure how I felt because at this point there are so many protections for not losing data I haven’t lost work in a long, long time.   I went out on the deck and made a phone call to someone who had message me.   I complained to her.   I saw my neighbor and I told my sad story to her.   They were both sympathetic.

Then, I started all over.   A small portion of what I’d done was still in one of the other files but I had to do most of it over again.   I finished a short while ago, making backup after backup and checking to make sure I was storing my work as I went.   It wasn’t as fun the second time, but the data is now all bucketed and organized and it’s still nice to see everything organized in a single spreadsheet.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Bicycle News:  My children have balance bikes, which they love.   They also have bicycles without training wheels they are wary of, but would like to learn how to ride.   This evening we spent some time with them both and they did quite well.   They can ride the bicycles themselves, but they still need some guidance.   I think with just a few more sessions/lessons, they’ll forget the balance bikes and want to ride their real bicycles going forward.