If you lose the outline of a character's life, just kill them off.
...and just paper over the ragged edges by hodoring a few scenes. After hodor, you hodor the hodor, hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor hodor, hodor.
I can't imagine writing for a living without using version control as well as a realtime-ish backup like Dropbox.
That is, until you share the Dropbox directory with someone and they delete everything to "save space" on their local disk, because they didn't realize it would "delete it on your Dropbox too". This happened to a creative professional friend of mine, and I'm surprised they're still friends.
That actually sounds like a very reasonable mistake for someone to make. I'm not familiar with exactly how the dropbox UI works (if they would have gotten prompts or warnings), but it does go outside of the typical users mental model if deleting a file on their drive means that the file gets deleted on the server and their friend's PC as well.
5 1/4s clearly.
Or dot matrix scrolls ;-)
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck probably.
There is a joke here about DOS and 5 years per book.