Hi Kevs:
The downside is that AutoRecover is NOT an auto backup (i.e it does NOT
protect you from your own mistakes...) Word does not HAVE an Auto Backup
function.
If you set AutoRecover to a non-zero value of minutes (in Preferences) Word
scans the document every specified number of minutes and writes only the
changes to it out to a temporary file.
When Word quits normally, it saves all the changes to each document that it
is holding in memory, to the document, then deletes the temporary files.
When Word starts up, it scans the Temp folder (a hidden system folder) for
Temp files. If it finds any, that means Word crashed. It then opens the
documents that the temp files refer to, and offers to re-apply the changes
it has found to recover the documents to the state they were in when it last
scanned.
We have been campaigning since Word 6 on the PC against this stupidity. 1)
If Word does not "crash", the mechanism does not work at all. 2) If Word
"corrupts" the document so that it cannot read it, there is nothing to apply
the temp file to, so the document cannot be recovered. 3) If the document
has NEVER been saved, there is nothing to recover with.
The best way to handle this is to simply ignore the AutoRecover mechanism
entirely. Set it to ten minutes and forget about it. On the rare occasion
when Word does crash, take care before accepting the "Recovered" version.
If you have been working properly, the recovered version will be older than
the one on the disk!
In Word>Preferences>Save, set the "Always make backup" option to ON.
To operate with minimum loss, get in the habit of hitting Command + s every
time you pause to think. With Always Make Backup turned on, every time you
save manually, the most recent version of each file is re-named "Backup
of..." and left in the same folder as the document. The new version is
written out to disk with the correct file name.
I have hit Command + s four times while writing this. The most I can lose
is this paragraph.
Hope this helps
Just lost lot of work today, can someone please let me know how this works
in Word? Any downsides? Thanks.
Kevs
OS 10.4.11
Office 2004
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
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