To be fair, I do believe you could have prevented this by saving multiple copies of this file. If I was writing a novel, I'd store copies in my email, in file sharing hosts, as well as in other computers. Haha, there's no way I'd contribute that much effort to something I was so passionate about without taking extra precautions.
- Make at least one backup for each day that I work on the file, named with the day's date. - When the backups are a week old, keep at least one backup per week and delete the extras. - When the backups are a month old, keep at least one backup per month and delete the extras. That gets so complicated though, especially if I know I won't be using my old material after I update it. But it's true I didn't have enough back ups! I had my novel on my hard drive and my thumb drive. When I saw my document double in size I quickly saved it and then foolishly saved it on on my thumb drive as well. I freaked out and it was a sudden reaction. If I had just saved it to my hard drive, and not to my thumb drive, I would have been fine. But I think Wrey's idea about Dropbox is excellent, because I will always have the material now. I may have read it wrong, but I even think that Dropbox updates it as you go, and you don't even have to save it again. Which is kind of weird because, what if you want to keep old drafts? But luckily I always want to keep my newest drafts so that works well for me. Thanks for the help everyone!
Doesnt open office save a cache every now and again? Im pretty sure it does... Pretty sure.. check the data files!
It's a configurable option in OpenOffice.org (just like the matching one in MS Word), and it sometimes rescues you, but it's best not to depend on it because both programs get rid of it when they close down normally. If you find you can't open the file, chances are the cached copy won't be there, whatever program you use.
You want to take a look at something like Microsoft Office Live Workspace or an equivalent. Most online storage sites give you a fair few gigabytes these days for storing backups, documents etc . . . , and you have the added bonus of being able to access your files from anywhere. Add to that the bonus of being able to easily recover from the dreaded hard disc crash and it can only make sense.
I'd still strongly recommend keeping an occasional extra backup, even if you're not interested in having material from your own old drafts. I suggest this because corruption or mistakes on your part are not always obvious. You don't want to back up to Dropbox Monday, overwrite that backup when you back up on Tuesday, and discover Wednesday that early on Tuesday you had a subtle corruption that destroyed the last hundred pages of your novel, while you were working on the first fifty pages. So I'd recommend several backups, even if you don't want a day-by-day, week-by-week backup schedule.
Burn the existing file to a CD-R as a back up. Call Mac tech support, or go to your Mac store and describe your predicament.
I'd still strongly recommend keeping an occasional extra backup, even if you're not interested in having material from your own old drafts. I suggest this because corruption or mistakes on your part are not always obvious. You don't want to back up to Dropbox Monday, overwrite that backup when you back up on Tuesday, and discover Wednesday that early on Tuesday you had a subtle corruption that destroyed the last hundred pages of your novel, while you were working on the first fifty pages. So I'd recommend several backups, even if you don't want a day-by-day, week-by-week backup schedule. Seeing how terrible Openoffice screwed up recently, that is not a far fetched scenario! Ha now I'm going to sound like a sales rep for dropbox but here goes. On dropbox, I can see all my different copies from the past 30 days. So if I work on the beginning of my novel and it messes up the last 100 pages of the novel, I can take that work I did at the beginning, and paste it onto a new document. Then open a copy of my novel from a week ago, which still has the correct last pages, and combine the two. So it seems to me that is the same thing as making backups of old versions. Maybe that sounds too good to be true but actually this dropbox is a pretty awesome thing. Plus I'll be switching to MS Word, just based on advice from this thread.
Quite apart from loss prevention due to software/hardware disasters, you should keep your drafts for provenance should you ever end up in a copyright dispute.
Exactly. You'll probably never have to prove it, unless of course, if you don't HAVE the drafts to prove it's really yours. Murphy's Law corollary.
If you are a fast reader and have a free day on your hands, you might as well open up a new file, label it "My Story Take Two" and then go through your first file from beginning to end. If you have large sections that haven't changed, you should move those into the second file. If you have sections that have changed, but only a little, you should fix the problems and move the fixed sections into the second file. If you can't do this for very long, just try it for as long as you have time for, then type ***STOPPED HERE***. Whenever you can, open up those files again and continue where you left off. Just getting MS Word won't fix your story, and won't guarantee that nothing ever happens again. Hard drives can die. Glitches happen. Portable thumb drives get lost or eaten by the dog. I knew one guy, at the time a junior in Physics at MIT, who lost a twenty page physics paper because MS Word had a one-in-a-million glitch. The very act of saving his work caused the program to corrupt that file, plus all of his backups. When he went to our tech department asking for help and explained the situation, their eyes kind of bugged and they said, "That's a really, really rare problem. Unfortunately, we've heard about it before -- and there's nothing we can do." He only got his paper back because another MIT student happened to be something of a Windows guru, and after hours of combing weird hidden files and directories he managed to find an autosave from a few minutes before that had survived. So live and learn. Go through your messed-up file, salvage what you can, delete the rest. You might have just accidentally copied the whole thing, and pasted a second copy in the middle of your first one. (Or not.) In any case, five hundred pages is a lot of writing, and I'd hate for you to lose all that progress just because you didn't want to spend 8 hours (or however long) undoing the damage and saving your story to a secondary file.
msword for mac is very reliable and i thought it came bundled? aparrently not. my personal suggestion is read. sit back and read through for a couple of days and you will quickly find where it has been repeated. and if you are that far through a novel, a re-read probably isnt a bad idea anyway
"Go through your messed-up file, salvage what you can, delete the rest. You might have just accidentally copied the whole thing, and pasted a second copy in the middle of your first one. (Or not.) In any case, five hundred pages is a lot of writing, and I'd hate for you to lose all that progress just because you didn't want to spend 8 hours (or however long) undoing the damage and saving your story to a secondary file." No I didn't accidentally copy the whole thing and paste it in the middle. I cut one paragraph and pasted it where it was supposed to go, but it pasted that part to an extra 500 pages. After hitting paste, I watched my document grow from 500 to 1048 pages. It pasted that part to an added 400 pages on the end and maybe 100 pages or so intertwined in the story. I also couldn't go through and fix things, because if I highlighted a paragraph, and hit "cut" it would then zip me ahead or back a couple hundred pages. So I couldn't even work on the document, it would just zip me around at random whenever I highlighted something. Like I said before, I turned it into a text document and was pleased to find that none of those errors showed. The original part I cut was not pasted anywhere other than where it was supposed to go. So I made a doc (windows) document in openofficeorg and moved my story onto that. It took about 6 hrs altogether. Another thing. Over the past year and a half, my odt (open office) documents would just stop saving, they would tell me I had an error when I tried to save, so I would have to resave them as doc (windows) documents. But my document with the actual story written happened to last the longest. I knew those odt documents were unreliable because I kept having to change them to doc documents, and I thought eventually I would have to save my writing as doc also. I never expected my odt document to crash in the way it did though! Ha I just figured it would eventually tell me I couldn't save it. That's why I started off this initial post by asking what is a reliable word processor. For over a year I've known these odt documents are unreliable, because they would randomly tell me I couldn't save. Then I would save them as doc documents. Furthermore, in openoffice, let's say you're reading a part that is 50 pages back, just to be clear on the details in your story. You have to make a change right there, 50 pages back (I would just type F and then erase it). Otherwise a time limit goes by and it whips you forward to the last place you made a change at. Then you have to go back and find that exact spot you were reading. I am not making this up. So frustrating! That's actually half the reason I'm switching to Microsoft Word. I HATE that aspect of OpenOffice. I don't expect everything to be perfect in Microsoft Word, but from my microsoft word days, I never remember having to deal with that problem. I only began using OpenOffice because it came with my Mac. I never thought it would turn out to be so lousy.
It may have been a faulty installation. As much as I'm not a fan of OpenOffice and other "compatible" word processing programs, I haven't heard complaints (other than yours) about its reliability. No matter which word processing program you use, software failures are always a possibility. Backups are a bit of a chore, but there is no better way to protect your valued documents, pictures, music files, etc. Sorry of I seem to be harping on this, but it's important.
Agree 100%. OpenOffice.org doesn't behave that way here, but whether it does or not, and whatever word processor you're using, things will go wrong, so keep lots of backups. Heck, even if you're typing the manuscript on a vintage Remington [1], take photocopies and leave them with a friend you can trust. [1] Other typewriter brands are available.
k that's good to know. it probably is just a problem with my computer or something, not OpenOfficeorg
