StewartKnight Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 Imagine the scene, Sunday afternoon, working on my Uni coursework, which has to be handed in on Monday...... making final correction, hit save Office has an error ](*,) my document deleted for ever! 2500 words disappeared into thin air! I downloaded a "free" recovery utility, but to recover the document you have to pay, I could view it though, so I had to retype the whole damn thing! If I ever get hold of Bill Gates :angryfire:
srochford Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 Imagine the scene, Sunday afternoon, working on my Uni coursework, which has to be handed in on Monday...... making final correction, hit save Office has an error ](*,) my document deleted for ever! 2500 words disappeared into thin air! Why didn't you just copy the file from your backup? This is hardly an Office 2007 problem - you'd have had the same problem if there had been a power cut or the hard disc had failed.
webman Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 What's wrong with Google Docs or something like that?
bossman Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 Backup! Backup! Backup! don't blame someone else for your mistake in not backing up your document elsewhere. Bill Gates is not responsible for your problems you are. Did you have auto recovery configured on office 2007? I guess not from your post, well don't mean to be hard and i am not trying to upset anyone but you have answered your own question.
StewartKnight Posted March 5, 2007 Author Posted March 5, 2007 Why didn't you just copy the file from your backup? This is hardly an Office 2007 problem - you'd have had the same problem if there had been a power cut or the hard disc had failed. Actually, this is a Office 2007 problem, the file had existed, but, Orrifice deleted the file.. completely!!!! Backup! Backup! Backup! don't blame someone else for your mistake in not backing up your document elsewhere. File was backed up, on the server at work and with a collegue (who wasn't online at the time DOH!). I was at home (it was a Sunday). The final document that I was working on was deleted by Office 2007. It's not that I hadn't saved the document, the document existed, the document didn't come up blank, the whole document was shreded by Office. I blame Office 2007, but I am using it on Vista, and vista really really sucks at the moment, so it might have been Vista, it might have been Office 2007, or it might have been a combination of the two. So are you 'upgrading' to OpenOffice next weekend? If only the Uni would accept admissions in different formats! Bossman Have I insulted you in another life, your comments were patronising and, to be blunt, offensive!
localzuk Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 Why didn't you just copy the file from your backup? This is hardly an Office 2007 problem - you'd have had the same problem if there had been a power cut or the hard disc had failed. Actually, this is a Office 2007 problem, the file had existed, but, Orrifice deleted the file.. completely!!!! I have had the same problem with Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. I haven't found a specific cause to it either.
CyberNerd Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 If only the Uni would accept admissions in different formats! They forced the entire site to switch to OfficeOpenXML ? Surely they accept formats like pdf, rtf, paper ? Even some of the strictest US scientific publishers accept pdf which openoffice natively exprorts
Swifty Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 If your using Windows Vista then it should be automatically taking backups on your behalf... go to where your Document was saved and right click the folder, select "Restore Previous Versions" then have a browse through the checkpoints... you might get lucky! On a side note i'm using Vista and O-2007, both have been relatively stable for me so f.... (i won't speak too soon!)
StewartKnight Posted March 5, 2007 Author Posted March 5, 2007 The saved location was a pen drive, only shared drives have the previous versions option. And I have the autosave option on Office set to every 10 minutes... so much for that!!!
srochford Posted March 5, 2007 Posted March 5, 2007 For the benefit of others, the auto-save in Word and Excel does exactly the same thing as clicking save every 10 minutes. In other words, it doesn't really do anything useful except possibly protecting you if there's a power cut. What you need to do is use Save As every 10 minutes (or every time you complete a few paragraphs) and give the file a new name. If you work in this way then no matter what happens (within reason!) you don't lose all your work when the program crashes etc. Ideally, you also save those versions to different locations - that way you're also covered if a drive fails (and flash drives can fail just like hard drives can fail and floppy drives fail)
bossman Posted March 6, 2007 Posted March 6, 2007 StewartKnight: apologies for the late reply; What do you find patronising and offensive about good common sense advice? quite frankly if you keep blaming everyone but yourself for the bad situations you find yourself in then you won't get very far. What i was offering was good advice and you choose to go down my throat and anyone elses who does not agree with you. This i find is a very blinkered approach to a problem that must have been encountered hundreds if not thousands of times so what makes you so different from the rest of us? yet we don't all go around slagging off large corporations just for the hell of it. I see now that the problem has been blamed on 2 elements of microsoft software, Vista and Office 2007 and you go on to say that Vista is not very good at the moment, well you don't say, Everyone but everyone keeps telling everyone about how flaky Vista is at the moment so why use it why not XP Pro with SP2 quite stable and office XP, in five years of using it i have yet to have a problem but then i did my thesis many years ago by hand.
StewartKnight Posted March 6, 2007 Author Posted March 6, 2007 actually Bossman, I was not blaming anyone for anything per say.. I was just sounding off about an unfortunate event, wondering if anyone else had had a similar problem. I was not looking for advice, as I had done all the things reasonably expected. Strangely, what I wasn't looking for, or expecting, was sanctimonious smug diatribes from know-it-all jerks. For the record, I have been working in IT for 23 years, so I think I know a thing or two about backups! Your original missive stated "Backup! Backup! Backup" Well, I did! I did! I did! Thank you for your invaluable advice, but if you don't have anything CONSTRUCTIVE to add, then please don't bother offering me your sageful advice.
localzuk Posted March 6, 2007 Posted March 6, 2007 I will go with srochford's advice. Office simply does eat files sometimes when it perceives that it has an I/O issue (the way it seems to write a file is by removing the old copy and creating a new one rather than appending to the old one - hence the file vanishing. And to go with this, it seems that if it thinks there is an I/O error, it doesn't retry a save). One of the options that I would advise to try is writing a macro to auto-backup for you. Or, if you have some money you could buy a license of BackupExec 11d with continual protection server which backs up versions. Other than that, you could try linux, open office and 'copyFS' a versioning file system - but that is a bit extreme and probably still wouldn't work properly. I think the 'backup backup backup' type comments come from people who haven't experienced the problems with office. Oh and also, as you state it was a USB key, I would advise that you do a thorough check of your key as the issue could be due to that.
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