Most definitely... You're taking a significant risk working exclusively
using floppies with Word.
The problem is that when you work with a Word document, the Word program
creates at least one temporary file (sometimes more) and if the media you
are working from is not able to hold all this temporary data as well as the
actual document, then corruption will probably occur.
The trick is to *always* save your Word documents to the hard drive. When
you've finished an editing session and *exited* from MS Word you can then
copy (or move) that saved file to your floppy [using Windows or DOS, *NOT*
saving via Word itself]. No corruption will have occurred because your hard
drive would normally have more then sufficient space to hold the document as
well as any temporary files created by MS Word.
The next time you need to edit the Word file, copy the document back from
the floppy onto the hard drive. Then do any editing/saving from Word onto
the hard drive. Then copy (or move) it back to the floppy again!
A bit of extra work is involved, but then again there will be no chance of
this sort of *avoidable* document corruption occurring.
BTW, this problem seems to crop up with all versions of Word, at least up to
Word XP (2002) - haven't heard much about Word 2003. In any case, I'd be
surprised if the problem had disappeared with new versions of Word since it
is *not* really a Word issue, but rather one of insufficient space to store
all the data on the diskette.
HTH
Rob.
LDL said:
Has anyone encountered document corruption when using diskettes exclusively
to create and save data? Thanks, Diane
