Screenwriting : What's been your worst technical disaster? by Phillip E. Hardy, Prolifique

Phillip E. Hardy, Prolifique

What's been your worst technical disaster?

A few years back, I had a Final Draft file somehow get corrupted and lost an entire script. Needless to say, I was really upset about that. I was fortunate enough have an older version of the screenplay stored on a memory stick but I still lost a lot of changes I had made. Now, I back up frequently on auxiliary sticks.

What was your worst disaster? Has anyone ever lost an entire script? That would be a mega bummer.

Doug Nelson

I've never lost an entire script; I have an 'auto save' function that saves wour to both an onboard drive and a freestanding external drive. At the end of the day, I manually save the script to an HD card. Sometimes I get a little confused as to what's on which card (I've got about 20 of 'em drifting around here.)

Jean Buschmann

SPRING, 1999

INT. BACK ROOM OFFICE - 'ROUND MIDNIGHT

Alone in her apartment, THE WRITER types feverishly, until she hears the distinct sound of someone...clipping their toe nails?

THE WRITER

(swiveling around)

What the heck?! Who's there?

No one's in sight. She resumes typing. The sound gets louder and louder.

Panic sets in when she suddenly realizes it's her G5 monitor - which is now blinking in sync with the sounds.

She knows it will fail at any second, and with her deadline rapidly approaching, it's a mad dash to finish and hit "print" before the screen ironically fades to bla...

____________

True story.

Craig D Griffiths

Forgot to turn on the audio recorder.

First push put it on standby, second push starts it. I was in a rush, looked saw the light and didn’t realise it was standby. 45mins of video, no audio.

Eric Christopherson

My crayon snapped.

Rutger Oosterhoff

Nock- nock-nock on table- no Phillip no, we are shootng right now....

Rutger Oosterhoff

Vincent

Teresa Barber

Eric Christopherson - you just made me smile, BEFORE my first cup of java. Well done!

Lance Ness

I haven't yet but I still back up most everything on flash drive. I did lose a sizable chunk of 1 script without backing it up but fortunately I had emailed it to my partner. Took a bit to put it back together but I have it again.

Stephen Floyd

I once got hit by ransomware and lost a whole draft and all my notes.

Daynon Sloane

My laptop died back in Dec 2018. I lost a couple of shorts that I thought I backed up. I never planned on doing anything with them, but it still sucked.

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