I've been scarce this week. Why?
Word. Microsoft Word. It ate my mailing list. Luckily a few days before I had printed out labels for my postcards, but while I was updated the list, Word hiccuped as I was saving it and it was gone. GONE. And the last time I had backed up was in January.
Well, there was more than just the gnashing of teeth, let me tell you. I've been working for TWO days to try to reconstruct it from various other lists, and I still have another 3-5 hours to go, and am missing over 300 addresses.
I also color code my list, so I know where the addresses came from. Now I'm wondering if the that was too much.
A long list + color coding = disaster?
So I'm going to break the list in half by zip code and back it up every night from now on.
I had hoped to get some serious writing done this weekend. Now . . . hello list building.
What important file have you lost on your computer?
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Gotta love technology don't you???.....Not!!!! Hope you get everything back up and running.
ReplyDeleteOh how horrible. I lost some precious pictures once upon a time--that was more a hardware issue than a software glitch. I hope you recover soon.
ReplyDeleteI lost the PTA membership list during membership drive. Had names, contact number and if they had paid. Was a pain to go back and look through all the cards to find all that info. It crashed while I was updating and addedany names. Computers are good but upsetting when they mess up.
ReplyDeleteI lost a 10-page report that I struggled with writing when right in the middle of saving, the machine crashed and all the times that I saved the data, it didn't.
ReplyDeleteThe only saving grace was I had sent the first 5 pages to my office email account so at least I didn't have to start from scratch.
My computer got a virus once that totally crashed the hard drive. I lost everything. Had a recent print-out of my current ms, but gone was my address book, stuff for my husband's business, everything. I learned my lesson - everything important gets backed up, and I keep info from my address book in an old fashioned index box on cards.
ReplyDeleteNot a problem with a Mac. It gets saved and is retrievable. Haven't used a PC in years (except for PC at work which I can't control). Once you go Mac, you won't go back. BTW, I remind myself to save externally. I'm not completely faithful to that, but then again I'm a "Mac". Sorry about your woes. Ask a computer geek. Still may be retrievable. Good luck.
ReplyDeleteWhat can I say but that I HATE Word and the feeling is mutual.
ReplyDeleteYe GODS!!! So sorry for your pain! I swear to heaven WordPerfect never did anything like that to me & I was a max-to-the-plus user. %@@#$Microsoft!! They took over the world and destroyed a perfectly good word processing program in the process. This "cloud" computing that MS is now pushing scares the living bejesus out of me. Amazon's server farm went down, Sony gives away millions of people's names, addresses, and passwords ... I guess the only way to be sure is to backup on hard drives both in your home & on some encrypted server farm. And store some of your I-have-to-have files on OCR-capable PDF files & then print those files out. Paranoid? I guess.
ReplyDeleteHope you can paste together all your list. ((Hugs))
My stupid word program has been making the file I'm working on into a 'read only' file, which means, to save all the new work on the chapter, I have to copy it all, put it in a new document, close the old one, and save the new one over top of the stupid 'read only' version.
ReplyDeleteNot a big deal, but annoying! Makes me lose my train of thought, and that train does not come by my station all the time!
I popped over here from Pat Rice's blog.
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain. I went through three hard drives in forty-five days and by the time the third one took a dump, it took my 2T external hard drive that I had everything backed up on with it.
Pictures, my stories, all of my notes, all of my OneNote research notes, everything was gone and because it took me longer than 30 days to turn Carbonite back on, all of my stuff there was lost too. Thank goodness for Google docs and OffiSync! At least I recovered some of my stuff.
You need to set your auto-save option to every five minutes in Word. Might seem like a bit much, but it's worth it. You'll always have a copy that's only five minutes old if you lose what you're working on and that's a wonderful thing sometimes.
Victoria, try unchecking the "allow background saves".
1. Click the Office button
2. Click the "Word Options" button
3. Select "Advanced" from the left navigation bar
4. Scroll down to the "Save" section
5. Un-check "Allow background saves"
6. Click the "OK" button
When it's doing a background save, Word (especially 2007) think the document is already open so you can't save a 'second' copy.
I email my manuscript to myself every time I work on it and it changes-- it's a fast and easy way to back up.
ReplyDelete