Tonight my wife (hence I) had a very unpleasant experience with Microsoft Word on Windows 10. She lost half a day of work because as she saved the document she was working on for hours, Word partially froze: the window was not responding. I tried the save button: no visual feedback. I tried the close button: it closed the window immediately. After reopening the document, we realized that only the first page got saved.... you can imagine the feelings about the universe in that very moment. Unfortunately she was not using OneDrive, and I don't think there was anything left to do to recover any previous version (checked temp files, nothing). Has this ever happened to you? Do you have any recommendations on how to handle these cases (apart from not using Office ever again)? For the moment, I would say, use OneDrive (maybe it was part of an evil playbook by MS after all...), but I'm open to any suggestions that could help my wife (and I) process the frustration.
If you have file history enabled, you might be able to get back one of the intermediate versions?<p><a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/file-history-in-windows-5de0e203-ebae-05ab-db85-d5aa0a199255" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/file-history-in-...</a>
Unfortunately working on a local machine with or without infrequent saves always carries a certain risk of data loss, since your computer could crash at any time due to power issues, disk failure or any other pc component dying or just a software bug like in the described case (but who knows, maybe the real reason was a hardware defect).
Either use features like auto save which should minimize the risk of creating corrupted save files or work on a network drive (or the cloud) with file versioning enabled and optimally frequent, incremental snapshots / backups.
But it's important to frequently save your file, otherwise you will increase the risk of data loss. And be aware, that working on a local machine is dangerous in itself - if you have to do that frequently however (no network connection), use external storage (small usb thumb sticks) for at least providing some kind of backup.<p>Fortunately I learned this lesson as a kid playing countless hours of RPGs where forgetting to save frequently lead to replaying hours of gameplay again... ;)
In all honesty, the easiest solution is to save more frequently than every few hours. OneDrive is definitely an option as there are some autosave features though.
21 years ago when I used Windows 2000 I faced such problems. One would think those kind of issues would be resolved by now. Anyway<p>I’m a developer so this may not be for everyone.<p>I use markdown+git for documents.<p>If I must use office, I write in gitlab markdown first (auto backups) and then copy into office
As you had specified in a different response, you did save often. If that didn't help, you could use Google Docs as others have suggested.<p>A third option is "LibreOffice Writer". I have not lost a doc/sheet on it yet. Even if I shutdown the system with an unsaved doc, the next time I open writer, it will prompt me for recovery. The caveat is, there might be small formatting and alignment differences. When I open a MS doc in Libreoffice, it output is formatted a bit differently but it might not be Libreoffice and might just be because of the different font stack available on my Ubuntu OS. Libreoffice is available for free though. So you can give it a try.
It is a good point that Word doesnt do versioning for a file saved on disk (as far as I know) while it does in sharepoint (I'm not familiar with onedrive).<p>If I'm working on high value documents (reports for work) I regularly save separate timestamped backup copies in a different location anyway, especially if it's a collaborative doc like sharepoint or google docs. But I'm sure i would have been caught by this too, I wouldn't do it more often than 1/2 daily except under some special circumstance.<p>You could just use google docs, I think it has versioning, though I don't know what triggers a version.
My best practices with MS Word are:
1. Disable fast saves.
2. Disable auto save.
3. Save often and always with a different name (1, 2, 3 etc).
4. After some hours of work, save, close word and open it again.
Point 1 and 2 are related to some bugs when word will crash during save and destroy your file. Point 4 is related to a bug in MS Word when, for every element in your file (text, graphics) word will create a temporary file until it fills your hard drive.
I do not recommend saving to any cloud storage (connection broken, bye bye file).
> For the moment, I would say, use OneDrive (maybe it was part of an evil playbook by MS after all...)<p>OneDrive won't change anything if you never save. From Word's point of view it's a regular path and just like writing to a disk.<p>You need to turn on AutoSave. <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-on-autosave-11c9f922-020b-439f-97f7-09b0041ed7cd" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-on-autosave-...</a>
I had Windows <i>Vista</i> in college. I learned to save often and have the main copy on a flash drive (then copy to the HDD in case I lost the flash drive).
Since only the first page got saved, it may be that the save was not working for some reason. Were you saving it to a network drive (or) an external drive?
Curiuos issue since I have not seen it happening - i mean the corrupted word doc with some pages...
When it happend, the whole document was lost. Word refuses to open it at all.
Google Docs solves this problem. Every revision is auto-saved in the cloud. It's come a long way since it was released 2006, pretty much has fidelity with every major Word feature. Also it's free with a Gmail account.