I've lost an entire finished book before when i got my new computer. It didnt transfer over yet i didnt know that and cleared my old computer to give it to my mom. I searched the deepest darkest corners of my old computers hard drive but it was gone. So i was in the process of re-writing it.
Oh, man, that's awful!
My horror story happened to my friend, who we'll call E. She and her crit group were very close (they went on trips to foreign countries together). One of the critters had given E a copy of her manuscript, printed out, to read at her leisure. E was going into Scriptfrenzy, so she was like, "I'm so excited to read it in May," but the friend was a little pushy, so she started reading it in the mornings while she got ready for work. Meanwhile the friend went to a writers' workshop and the critiques she got there convinced her to make major changes to her novel. She did not save a copy of the original version.
E was getting ready and drinking tea and reading the ms. when her cat jumped on the table and spilled the tea all over the ms. E was late for work, so she threw the ms in her tub covered with towels to soak up the tea. When she got back from work, it was a solid brick of paper. She threw it away and tried to figure out how to tell her friend.
The next day her friend calls and says, "I need it back!" She decided she wanted the original version after all and the only copy of the original was supposedly in E's hands. So E explains what happened, and the friend did not believe her. Now, it's understandable for someone to be upset when something like this happens, and even to blame the other person for ruining the only copy of that version of your book, even if the blame is unjustified. However, she told everyone in the crit group that E had
stolen the book and was going to sell it herself, and everyone believed her (only recently have some of them started to go, "Wait, that doesn't really make sense for her..."). And since E had thrown away the block of paper that had been the ms, she didn't have any proof that her side of the story had happened. It's this total "Nevada Day" story that you wouldn't believe if it was fiction.