Twice now, I have lost all the work from a single day (or part of a day) of writing. MSWord is set to autosave every two minutes and occasionally I hit [ctrl+s] out of habit, from working in college, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Last Saturday I had the briefest power flicker and the computer shut down. When it came back up, I had lost a couple of hours of work. Maybe 19 pages of pretty good stuff. Needless to say I was furious. I went back to work and spent the next 24 pages killing a bad guy. I am pretty sure I took out my frustrations on him. It seems autosave is NOT the same as a real save. I don't know what the real problem is but there was no record at all of the work I had done. Not even temp files to recover with [RECUVA]. If there is a way to make Word really save, I'd love to know what it is, but otherwise, I suppose this post is just a warning so others never have this happen You need to exit and re-start the program for it to make a full save.
turn off the auto-save crap that obviously doesn't auto save and instead hit the save button every once in a while. too many glitches in MS Word and these are glitches they know about!
I think it is like a true save, but the document is saved to a different location. You can look in options to see where the auto save files are going and try to open them from Word. They should be there, even though the original document won't reflect the auto save changes.
After a power interruption, be sure you open MS Word directly, and not by clicking on an existing document file. That may cause it to prompt you about recovery of what it last saved.
Yeah, that's a good point. People sometimes bypass document recovery that way. If it is already too late for the automated document recovery, the auto-saved files should still be in the folder they are being saved to, and you can still access them directly from within MSWord.
How odd that there's no recovery - whenever my laptop shuts down, it always gives me a recovered file. Anyway, I think just save more often. Seriously, how on earth did you manage to write NINETEEN PAGES without saving once manually? It's almost like a twitch that I have to save every so often, every paragraph or so - I don't even think about it. Mind you, I have a temperamental laptop, so maybe that's why
I switched to OpenOffice, http://www.openoffice.org/. It's free, open source, well supported, and works well on Winders and Linux. What a relief when I restart the computer and try to open any document with it. First thing it does is tell me about the document(s) it is recovering, that I forgot to save because I was too tired, or my battery died, or the pwr went out. The autosave seems to work well too. While working I save in the faster .odt format but then save to .doc if I need to go to a Word only machine. It is a whole suite of office tools, spreadsheet, calc, draw, etc. John My friend has a tagline on his e-mail: Microsoft has done for software what McDonald's has done for hamburgers. There's a lot of it, it may get you by, but it ain't necessarily good.
This should solve your problem. I use word 2010, and this sounds familiar. You can change the location to which word saves the autosave file. I have it set to save to the same location as my original, to make things easier. I then back up to another location.
I like OO, but I think the development of LibreOffice is ahead of OO at this point, and it has better compatibility. A lot of OpenOffice developers left to pursue the LibreOffice fork when Oracle acquired OO.
I use Microsoft Works Word Processor, myself. It doesn't have as many frills, but it's solid, reliable, and--unlike Word--it was free on my laptop. I think B93 nailed it. Just like most web browsers will ask if you want to restore your last session if it wasn't shut down properly, word should bring up an autosaved document by opening the program. Opening the specific doc file will bring what you last save manually. But yeah. I've found myself hitting ctrl+s even if I'm just making notes in my notebook, and haven't touched the keys for several minutes. Of course, I also find myself reaching for the undo button wheniImess up with pen and paper.
Oops, sorry. Apparent brain fart here. You are absolutely write. Don't know what I was thinking about. Hmmm, maybe my real job.... Forget OO, I think LO is where the real talent went. But Windows still ranks 3rd in my book. Then there is google docs. Though I have never lost anything there and expend zero effort to save or backup, I wonder who really owns my documents there. Dang sure handy sometimes though, specially if you have to stop and use a library computer with all their stuff, or lack of. jh
I do think LO is a bit ahead, but LO is still being developed so I think you're right that it is still good There is also Kingsoft, which is a free office suite, but I haven't tried that one so I can't comment from personal experience. For fiction writing, I used Scrivener, which I really like.
Windows tends to delete open files on NTFS after a power failure. If Word had the file open when the power went out, scandisk (or whatever it's called these days) might have deleted the new version and left you with an old one. This used to be particularly bad with Firefox bookmarks until about version 3, where a blue-screen or power failure with Firefox running would probably result in an empty bookmarks file. This one reason why I write in Linux on a laptop . So, even if Word is working properly, making backup copies of the file on an regular basis is a good idea.
Somebody mentioned MS Works. It is fine if you are satisfied with it, except that over the history of its versions there have been several instances where people could not read their old files with a new version of Works, nor with Word or other programs. If you use Works, I'd advise keeping files in some exported, more portable format rather than its native format. I think it does RTF, and that's about as portable as anything that has basic formatting.
I'll poke around, after a fresh re-start of Word, via the shortcut (rather than clicking the file, right from the thumb drive, as I have been doing) to see if I can find the location of the temp files. I'll see which version I like better and possibly blend from there. I am not unhappy with how the second set of writing went, but I certainly was unhappy with being forced to do it. And believe me, the bad guy was VERY sorry I lost all that data, just as he was about to be disassembled over a period of weeks so the main characters could learn surgery, from the only doctor in the book. MUHAHAHA- I mean... would you believe... giggle?
Found it! C:\Users\XxxxxXxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\ is the file. Whee. The new one is quite a bit better so I suppose pulling half my hair out and brushing off a few swear words that have not been used in a few years, was... a blessing?
Can't tell you how often that's happened to me, especially in academic work. Sometimes, what's written the second time is more like your first revision since it's been thought through once. I still don't like having to do it though. Glad you found your file.
Hi, You can switch the type of save you do from a simple autosave system where the file itself is updated, to a back up save system where each save essentially makes your current document the back up. Then if you run autosave you'll never lose more than five minutes or so (unless your disk is fried - and I do suggest running a scan on it after a power fail.) By the way, if you do use the back up saves be sure that your word program is set up to show the .bak files. Otherwise if you lose your current document you'll be sitting there pulling your hair out wondering what happened to it, when its actually right there. Cheers, Greg.
