I've lost about 10pages of my work on Google Docs

[Guest]

Y'all, I am about to lose my mind right now,or wait. I think I lost it already. You know I've lost about 10pages of my work. I do everything on Google Docs but when I came to open it just now, all I see is the old version. Did Google cheat me?

Has anybody been through this? Eish, eish, eish... Send help and redeem my sanity, as soon as you can.

[Denise]

It's online so to save your work you need to be online at the time you save or have work offline settings enacted.
Try going to history but it sounds like you were offline when you wrote those pages.

[Elizabeth]

Take a breath. This stuff happens. Do you have a friend who is your go-to for computer problems? Talk to them. In the meantime, PRINT OUT your current draft. That way Google Docs can't eat any more of it. Then have a cup of tea and start again with the pages you lost. Sometimes it happens. You'll be okay.

[Alexis]

Google docs stores different versions of your work. There's a link at the top. Maybe you're in an older version.

[Ayaz]

Word of advice: always try using a word processor application like text or word so u have all your work both on and offline.

[Marcia]

I lost an entire handwritten novel once. Right in the middle of a series. I managed to reconstruct it from scratch based on references in later books and memory. I truly believe the result was superior to the first version. A blessing in disguise! Sometimes it’s okay when these things happen.

[Jennie]

Ooof. This is why I only use google docs to send my piece to readers and I use google drive as an additional back-up. I back up on my computer, two flash drives and another drive. Plus I write by hand and occasionally print my piece out to read.

I don't trust the cloud or any of that, and seeing as this is at least the third post where someone has lost their writings on docs, it definitely makes me not want to use it for that purpose at all.

[Victoria]

If you wrote offline then it's saved on that device. Go back to the doc in that device and sync it to your google doc drive.

If you were online then go to the version history and restore the version you want.

Google docs and great at saving everything automatically. One time I accidentally deleted a section of a chapter and was able to find the missing piece in the history.

[Roger]

I lost the most recent 5,000 of my current work. I simply started re-writing, telling myself it will be better than before. Not completely 'fool-proof' as I've since tried and failed to recover them. I'm fine now though.