Lost Work

[Nancy Baird]

I just lost over 100 pages of work, and I'm devastated! I've been using Appleworks for years and never had any problems like this, and after analyzing the situation I'm wondering if I could have figured it out. With previous documents I usually closed them after saving and left them on the desktop until the next day. With this lost document I had not closed it for some time. At the end of the day I would simply save it and put the computer to sleep after backing it up w/a flash drive. But this document was well over 100 pages, and I'm wondering if, when I did go to close it (which was when it just disappeared) it was just too large to close, even though it had been saved. All I had left was the first 25 pages. I've searched with Searchlight and got a message saying the disk was not available anymore, with an Error code -35. At first I thought it was the flash drive, but I've used the same flash drive since and not had any trouble. Anybody know what could have happened, so I don't repeat this fiasco?

[bhludlow]

I just lost over 100 pages of work, and I'm devastated! I've been using Appleworks for years and never had any problems like this, and after analyzing the situation I'm wondering if I could have figured it out. With previous documents I usually closed them after saving and left them on the desktop until the next day. With this lost document I had not closed it for some time. At the end of the day I would simply save it and put the computer to sleep after backing it up w/a flash drive. But this document was well over 100 pages, and I'm wondering if, when I did go to close it (which was when it just disappeared) it was just too large to close, even though it had been saved. All I had left was the first 25 pages. I've searched with Searchlight and got a message saying the disk was not available anymore, with an Error code -35. At first I thought it was the flash drive, but I've used the same flash drive since and not had any trouble. Anybody know what could have happened, so I don't repeat this fiasco?

This has only happened to me once; and luckily, it was only a couple of pages. I suspect it might be that you renamed or moved the original document while you had the document open, between the times you created the first 25 pages and your additions. I sure wish I could tell you that I was able to "find" my missing pages, but alas, is not so; they are forever gone. Could it be that you worked originally on the computer's copy, and later worked on the flashdrive's copy?

Best precaution is to always close the document at the end of the day, backing up with new version name occassionally, and never, ever rename in the finder while a document is open.