Y’know, jump drives aren’t totally reliable. Their little bits go bad sometimes and the document you were working on becomes corrupted.* This happened to a professor today, and several hours of his work was at stake.
Trying to retrace your steps from memory on a complex document that you are producing under deadline is no fun at all, and we have all been there. I quickly copied the document to the desktop and tried opening it again. Nope, Microsoft Word 2007 wanted nothing to do with it, not even with the “Repair” and “Recover” functions. I opened it in Notepad++ and recovered at least most of the text, but the formatting was gone.
But I had one other trick up my sleeve. Copying it to a network drive, I went back downstairs to the desktop computer in my office and opened it up in the Open Office word processor. Almost all of the formatting was intact. I saved it again with a new filename and a .doc extension and emailed it back to the professor.
Not that it would work every time, but it’s worth a try.
* (A couple strategies here. First, “Save As” multiple versions of your documents as you go, like this: Mar09report_ver1.doc, mar09report_ver2.doc, and so on. If the document is really important, copy to more than one drive – perhaps a jump drive and a network drive. If it’s really, really important, burn it on a CD and take it offsite. Also, every once in a while, burn the contents of your jump drive to a DVD, check that the copy is good, then reformat your jump drive and copy your files back onto it. Keep the DVD as a backup. And don’t use a jump drive for more than a year or so.)
Of everything I deal with in my years of IT service I hated it when someone came to me with a corrupt file or missing file. The solution is never perfect and it always seemed to eat up most of my day trying to solve the problem.
I will have to keep Open Office in mind though as a solution.
Just think of all the time and money saved by going to Open Office.
When I need to create a Word doc with fill-in fields, I use OO Write to create it and then save it to Word format.
I will have to try that. Might be easier. I am also amused by the enthusiasm of people discovering that, through a somewhat convoluted process, Microsoft Word can now save documents as .pdf files. OO has had that ability – one click – for many years.
Somebody has tried to estimate the money that would be saved with open-source software, anyway. Linux magazine made a back-of-the-envelope calculation about it.
I do like Open Office but would never have thought about your recovery technique. Nice to know. I was also not aware of reliability problems with jump drives. Thanks. Got to go make some backups now.
You’ve just saved me a ton of future pain. Muchas gracias!