AutoRecovery Question

[Thomas M]

Word 2000

Before I state my question, let me say that I did not personally witness
what the user did, or what happened in the aftermath. I got my report
second hand, so it's hard to say what truly transpired. That being said,
here is what I was told...

A few weeks ago one of the users that I support lost several hours of work
because Word crashed unexpectedly and he had not saved his document, and
then Word failed to recover his file when it restarted. The user has Word
set to save autorecovery information every 10 minutes. When Word did not
recover the file automatically after being restarted, the user attempted to
find the .WBK file, but was not able to locate the file.

With regards to the .WBK file, I suspect that the user was looking in the
wrong location because the file location for autorecover files is different
than the document and startup file locations, and the user is not
sophisticated enough with Word to know how to find the correct file
location. However, in theory the file location should not matter, and Word
should have been able to recover the file. But alas, I know that theory
does not often match the real world. This might be something of a broad
question, but what are the possible causes of Word's failure to recover the
file, and how might I go about making the autorecovery operation more
reliable?

--Tom

 

[Doug Robbins]

The .WBK file is not the file created by the Autorecover utility. It is the
file that is created if the "Always create backup copy" box is checked under
Tools>Options>Save.

The autorecover file will have a name the same as the file name except that
the first two characters of the filename will be replaced by ~$.

If Word really did crash (and it was not the operator) then Word does
usually (and in my experience, quite reliably) recomver such files.

If the ~$ file still exists, it can (sometimes) be opened to provide some
usable text by using the "Recover text from any file" option in the Files
of type pulldown in the File>Open dialog.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think you are confusing the "owner" file (~$lename.doc) with the
AutoRecovery backup file (AutoRecovery Backup of <filename>.asd).

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

To add to what Doug has said, see
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/AutomaticSave.htm

 

[Thomas M]

I do NOT have the "Always create backup copy" box checked. The only options
that are checked on the Save tab of the Options dialog box are the "Allow
background saves" and "Save AutoRecover info every" boxes.

Here is what I did as a test.

1) Set the AutoRecover interval to one minute
2) Closed Word and then opened it again
3) Typed a line in Document1 and then waited two minutes (to make sure
the AutoRecover information had a chance to be saved)
4) After two minutes, and without first saving the file, I literally
pulled the plug on the machine

When I powered the machine back up I found a file called "AutoRecovery save
of Document1.wbk". When I opened Word the file was recovered as I would
expect.

The same user that lost the document says that he lost another one today.
However, today he said that he might be hitting a key down on the bottom row
of the keyboard. I thought that maybe he hit a shortcut key that closed the
document, but he maintains that he did NOT get a prompt to save the document
(which a user would see if they were closing the document without saving),
and I could not find any key combinations that close the document without
prompting the user to save it first.

Suzanne posted a link to an article on the various Save options in Word, and
it looks the AutoRecover feature does not work in the way that the user
things it should. I may try the SaveReminder add-in from Graham Mayor in an
effort to train the user to save his work periodically.

--Tom

 

[Thomas M]

Suzanne,

Thanks for the link. That explains a lot, and I will use that link to help
explain to the user how the AutoRecover feature works. I may also try the
SaveReminder from Graham.

--Tom

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Going as far back as Word 2.0, which actually had a feature misleadingly
named AutoSave, this feature has behaved in (more or less) the same way. In
no case did it save a copy of the document if the file was manually,
intentionally closed without saving. It was always intended only to save
files in case of Word hangs, system crashes, or power outages, and that's
what it still does.

It does it *much* better than it used to, to be sure; if Word hangs, it
graciously saves a copy of the current document *while* it is closing down
and presents that, along with any previously saved AutoRecovery backups,
when you restart Word (in fact, I think it restarts Word for you). It also
tells you which of the three files (your own last save, the last regularly
scheduled AutoRecovery backup, and the backup saved during the crash) is the
most recent.

I think this is pretty spectacular. But it does nothing to help the user who
closes a file intentionally without saving, and that is the message I keep
trying to get across to users.