Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word • Hacker News Board

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#21

Post by musicale » Mon, Nov 08, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

dfcowell wrote: post #16

If you have file history enabled, you might be able to get back one of the intermediate versions? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/file-history-in-...

Definitely File History on Windows + Track Changes in Word.

(Or on macOS, using a file system which supports Browse Versions and enabling Time Machine backups as well.)

For things you really care about, periodic cloud backups and/or cloud saves as well, and periodic print copies for good measure.

The saddest thing is when someone's laptop with all of their data or documents is stolen, or their data/documents are destroyed physically in some disaster, and they have no backup.

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#22

Post by HanaShiratori » Mon, Nov 08, 2021, 7:44 AM UTC

Unfortunately working on a local machine with or without infrequent saves always carries a certain risk of data loss, since your computer could crash at any time due to power issues, disk failure or any other pc component dying or just a software bug like in the described case (but who knows, maybe the real reason was a hardware defect). Either use features like auto save which should minimize the risk of creating corrupted save files or work on a network drive (or the cloud) with file versioning enabled and optimally frequent, incremental snapshots / backups. But it's important to frequently save your file, otherwise you will increase the risk of data loss. And be aware, that working on a local machine is dangerous in itself - if you have to do that frequently however (no network connection), use external storage (small usb thumb sticks) for at least providing some kind of backup.

Fortunately I learned this lesson as a kid playing countless hours of RPGs where forgetting to save frequently lead to replaying hours of gameplay again... ;)

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#23

Post by ToFab123 » Mon, Nov 08, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

cloudking wrote: post #9

Google Docs solves this problem. Every revision is auto-saved in the cloud. It's come a long way since it was released 2006, pretty much has fidelity with every major Word feature. Also it's free with a Gmail account.

Word has the same if you save your documents in a folder backed up by OneDrive and you turn on auto save in word.

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#24

Post by hulitu » Mon, Nov 08, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

My best practices with MS Word are: 1. Disable fast saves. 2. Disable auto save. 3. Save often and always with a different name (1, 2, 3 etc). 4. After some hours of work, save, close word and open it again. Point 1 and 2 are related to some bugs when word will crash during save and destroy your file. Point 4 is related to a bug in MS Word when, for every element in your file (text, graphics) word will create a temporary file until it fills your hard drive. I do not recommend saving to any cloud storage (connection broken, bye bye file).