UTMC

I just spent seven hours writing a paper in MS Word.
I saved it twice, just to be sure.
I then closed the document, put my computer to sleep, and came home to print it.

It's not there.
It's not showing in any file history.
I have searched my computer to the best of my ability by date modified and date created, and nothing has come up.

I am using windows vista on an HP 65xx laptop.

My paper is due at 10:30 am.
It is 3:05 am.

Even if I get an extension, I don't have time to write it again.
Anybody have any ideas?

Hindsight and all that, but I tend to email myself attachments of stuff I don't want to lose just in case.

/RM

Nevermind.
I removed indexed searching as an option, and re-did the search everywhere option for all files modded on this date.
A copy of it turned up in a temporary app data file. Thank fucking god.
I'm going to bed now.

Problem solved!

been there suffered that.

glad you got it found.

sun rat wrote:been there suffered that.

glad you got it found.

Yeah, but you were cursing open office, weren't you?

Seriously, though...I doubt that there is any sort of office application short of actual database stuff that I haven't, at some point, used on my private PC for school, work or private matters, and I have never actually lost a saved file.
I have accidentally overwritten tons of stuff, deleted something without looking, saved into the wrong folder, and I once had a proper HD crash, but never completely lost a file after having saved it.
You guys up on your malware protection?

malware? come on. but maybe you work on the latest and greatest pc ever built.

just wait till it gets old. and then you lock up. and you have to do a hard reboot. and you find that office(after an automated update) had reset its auto save to pretty much never(default is sometimes once an hour).

so yeah. i set my autosave to every five minutes, but it is not standard that way. so if an office update happens to tinker with that then you'll be screwed too one day.

sun rat wrote:malware? come on. but maybe you work on the latest and greatest pc ever built.

just wait till it gets old. and then you lock up. and you have to do a hard reboot. and you find that office(after an automated update) had reset its auto save to pretty much never(default is sometimes once an hour).

so yeah. i set my autosave to every five minutes, but it is not standard that way. so if an office update happens to tinker with that then you'll be screwed too one day.

Erm...my last PC was a Frankensteinian creation made from various components between four and six years old, an operating system which had so many unsucessful/interrupted updates the install disk wouldn't recognize it anymore and that spent about five minutes spitting up error messages when I booted up. It sounded like an impact drill being rammed through a cheese wheel, from the tired and worn out fans, but once it was running, it was running well enough. Sometimes it would get awfully slow, or do a crashing thing, and that has cost me some amount of work at times.
I must admit, for a few years, the basic way I fixed anything wrong with the software was to format and do a clean install, and I didn't always keep up on my updates. But I eventually grew tired of reinstalling all the applications, re-doing the settings and all that stuff.
I retired it when the cpu fan actually broke from material fatigue and I could afford and also wanted something new.

I honestly don't know where my autosave is set in open office, I save when I have done something and am about to move on to the next phase.
I have forgotten to save before, yes, and I lost work from hard rebooting, that has happened, but when I have actually clicked the little floppy-disk icon, nothing has ever truly disappeared. Misfiled, but not gone.

I thought we were talking about manual saving, rather than auto saving. When I create a new file, first thing I usually do is save it someplace I will find it again, under it's own little filename, so I only have to hit save when I want to save.

I'm probably lucky, but still, a file that has been saved, actually saved to disk, just going poof, that is what hasn't happened to me.

Everything else, sure, tons of it.

Just talked to a friend about this, he pointed out the Linux ext4 prefetching problem, which can theoretically happen anywhere, if you are reading data from your HD while, at the exact same time, trying to write to it. The stuff from your ram isn't written to disk but to the disk cache, as the disk is busy reading at that moment.
So, if for some reason it isn't written to the disk after the reading is done, it will go poof once you switch the machine off.

So, save early, safe often, still applies.

i think you now can see how floored i was by the open office problem i had earlier.... i WAS manually saving and it effed up at a crucial time.
so now i am wondering if the prefetching problem also exists in win 7.

the only time i ever had file issues before in office was from xp, but saving across the network and having a switch hiccup.

sun rat wrote:i think you now can see how floored i was by the open office problem i had earlier.... i WAS manually saving and it effed up at a crucial time.

Which is what I thought everyone was talking about at first, and which is why I couldn't wrap my head around a file saved to disk just disappearing.

The old Apple program of that sort (I've wiped the name from my memory) had a bug where it would randomly save the first 3-4 paragraphs and nothing else. I lost a few chapters of my book before I purged that piece of garbage from my computer.

Adobe Illustrator also has a bug where it will sometimes crash when saving a document, thus corrupting it into a digital hell where if you're lucky enough to recover the file, it will be missing some or all of the information. I've taken to saving each time into a new document, just to be on the safe side.

It still baffles me that we're constantly stuck with this beta quality garbage

Adobe Illustrator is hilarious. Almost every time I tell it to quit, it tells me that it couldn't, because it unexpectedly quit. Which leads me to wonder what the expected behaviour is, exactly.

!!! That same thing happens to me too! Adobe products are like dating an olympian supermodel with alcoholism! I wonder if they've fixed the world-ending "don't do more than 99 layers in Photoshop" bug yet? Last time I checked it fried all my prefs, corrupted a few of the worky bits and I had to re-install.

on my iMac Illustrator quits almost every time I open a large file in Photoshop which is part of the same CS2 installation, no such issues on PC when I open same file.

You tried using google docs? I work up files there for quiz night and stuff, and have access to them all the time, even from my phone.

Otherwise, I use open office, and Inkscape for vector graphics (it's still in beta, and does crash, but it's free, powerful, and has a ton of help/support/tutorial stuff)