Don’t Let This Happen to You!

Having lost more than a few hours of work, on more than a few occasions, due to some catastrophic system failure in the middle of a drafting session during which I had failed to regularly back up the work, I’ve learned my lesson well, and now religiously back up documents as I am working on them.

But, it turns out, that is not always sufficient.

Today I learned the very hard way that if you open a document which you receive as an attachment in email, and edit it, to *not* just blindly hit “save”, but be *sure* to first do a “save as”, and give it a proper filename.

Because as I saved a total of several hours worth of work which I had done over the course of the day to this file which had come as an email attachment, it never once occurred to me to change the file name. The file name turned out to be a temporary file name assigned by my email program, and when I shut the email program down, sure enough…I lost all of my work, because the email program wiped the temporary file. Sob.

No warning, no “do you want to save all of your changes before they are lost in closing a temporary file”, no nothing. There I was blindly clicking “save” in Word every five or 10 minutes, and all that work was wiped in the blink of an eye.

(Yes, I know I can set word to do an autobackup -I *thought* that it was..but nope, it wasn’t.)

Anyways, don’t let this happen to you.