After searching through several flash drives, I finally found several drafts of my first novel, Bethany Caleb, which I am considering self-publishing in advance of Hitchhikers. More as a test of the whole self-publishing system, but also because I still love that story and found an awesome image to make a cover with!
However, none of the drafts was the FINAL draft. The best I have is a draft up to Chapter 7 (out of 10). I feel like this complete novel must be out there somewhere… I had posted it on Authonomy a few years back, got a couple of reviews. But then I took it down because I didn’t really like how the site basically encouraged people to fish for reviews, or only review other people’s stuff so that they could get their stuff reviewed. And I deleted by entire account, so no hope there…
So I went to Google, thinking MAYBE there were some archived garbage including my full novel somewhere on the internet.
And I found THIS: a story with a main character named Kate Spofford. Strangely enough, the following chapter is called “The Hitchhiker.” So weird!!
Anyway, now I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Keep looking for the elusive final draft of this novel? Rewrite the darn thing? (I’ve only rewritten it about 10 times. Seriously). It reminds me of how I couldn’t find a full final draft of The Art Kids and ended up with the proof copy of the book I had printed up years earlier and RETYPED THE ENTIRE THING (Thank God for hard copies!!). I would almost rather do that than try to rewrite it…
Work in Progress 
What about USB keys? External hard drives? Email archives? Best of luck in your search 🙂
I originally had all the drafts on 3.5″ disks. About a year ago, I went searching for “The Art Kids” final draft and decided at that point to update all those old files and move them to a USB drive since my new laptop doesn’t even have a disk drive. I seem to recall, in the conversion, that there were a lot of errors reading the files and parts of the file were lost. But I have this vague memory of a draft 10 of “Bethany Caleb”… and no disk to prove it. I think I still have my old laptop at my parents’ house that I might boot up to see if there isn’t a random file on it somewhere…
I also discovered that my incomplete draft 9 is only 27 pages long, so that’s really only about a quarter/third of the final work 😦