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Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

11 points by jackjackk0 ↗ HN
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.

23 comments

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antasvara
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.
jackjackk0
Please note that the problem was not the lack of frequent saving per se, which was done. The problem was that it took just one corrupted save (the last one) to destroy the benefit of all previous saves. Unless you meant save in different files, which would become cumbersome very quickly.
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version_five
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).

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.

You could just use google docs, I think it has versioning, though I don't know what triggers a version.

Jtsummers
Word has track changes which lets you view what changes have been made and who made them. But you need to turn this on (I think it's under "Review"), and you should still follow the rule of "save early, save often". C-s is my fidgety muscle-memory behavior when otherwise staring at the computer screen trying to decide what to type/do next.

It's not quite the same as versioning, because it's still possible to clear out the history of changes (in fact, when you accept changes that's what it does), but it's pretty effective.

shadowAuror
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.
openssl
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

I’m a developer so this may not be for everyone.

I use markdown+git for documents.

If I must use office, I write in gitlab markdown first (auto backups) and then copy into office

jackjackk0
Please note the Word was at its latest version of the Microsoft 365 package. I definitely sympathize with your approach (as a nerdy engineer) but unfortunately I don't see my wife's profession compatible with such plain text acrobatics...
gigglesupstairs
Use Onedrive. You already have 365, it comes with it. It has auto save, which is a lifesaver.
version_five
I've also used markdown for documents a lot, and use pandoc when I need to convert it to a word doc (or html or pdf via latex). For more complex stuff I end up using word because the formatting is more flexible, if fragile. But this is a good reminder that I would like to set up a more professional standard markdown to word template for reports.
cloudking
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.
krater23
But there are many things that you don't want to store on a giant software company's computersystems that's specialized on examining data.
ToFab123
Word has the same if you save your documents in a folder backed up by OneDrive and you turn on auto save in word.
sharmi
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.

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.

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herendin2
May be possible to unpack the file and search for the missing words. Try changing the format to .ZIP
dfcowell
If you have file history enabled, you might be able to get back one of the intermediate versions?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/file-history-in-...

musicale
Definitely File History on Windows + Track Changes in Word.

(Or on macOS, using a file system which supports Browse Versions and enabling Time Machine backups as well.)

For things you really care about, periodic cloud backups and/or cloud saves as well, and periodic print copies for good measure.

The saddest thing is when someone's laptop with all of their data or documents is stolen, or their data/documents are destroyed physically in some disaster, and they have no backup.

giantg2
I had Windows Vista 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).
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HanaShiratori
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.

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... ;)

hulitu
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).