Always back up. Even when you think you are automatically backing up, manually back up. Manually save documents. Not a computer crash and really not the end of the world, but Word for Mac seems to be a particularly unstable program (for me at least), often when I am working on long, involved documents for a day at a time without remembering to manually save – suddenly telling me that it has insufficient memory, wants me to close a window even though only one is open, and then refusing to save. And not showing anything in the autorecover file afterwards. Ouch. All the many changes to my targeted killing Predator piece made over nine hours today – poof!
chiMaxx says:
“Save As” and you will be saved.
January 26, 2010, 5:19 pmA. Dawson says:
MacFAIL…
January 26, 2010, 5:20 pmh2u says:
Kenneth, which version of the Mac OS are you using? And which version of MS Office?
The latest versions of both — Mac OS X 10.6 and Office 2008 — are very stable. I highly suggest upgrading to at least OS 10.5 and Office 2008. There’s no reason you should be getting insufficient memory errors using those versions.
Also, I highly suggest using Apple’s Time Machine software backup service with an external hard drive. It would have made a significant difference.
Please feel free to contact me should you need detailed technical support.
January 26, 2010, 5:34 pmCDU says:
An old programmer joke seems apropos:
January 26, 2010, 5:36 pmzuch says:
Let it be noted that Word is still a M$ product, even on Macs.
Cheers,
January 26, 2010, 5:43 pmDaniel Chapman says:
Appleworks. Same compatibility issues, none of the crap.
January 26, 2010, 6:03 pmh2u says:
AppleWorks was discontinued a while ago.
Are you thinking of Pages?
I highly recommend the iWork applications — Pages is a very solid word processing application, albeit one focused more on appearance than anything else. If you’re simply looking to type up text, TextEdit is your friend.
January 26, 2010, 6:10 pmDavid Schwartz says:
I would add one more piece of advice:
Learn the keyboard sequence for ‘save’ on the program you use most. (It’s alt-f, s on most Windows programs.) And get used to hitting it automatically right as you finish typing one thing and pause to think about the next.
Just be careful not to hit it after deleting something and before thinking about how to reword it!
January 26, 2010, 6:19 pmh2u says:
Or, alternatively, use Google Documents which will save your work and show you a running revision history.
January 26, 2010, 7:02 pmJohnF says:
If you aren’t using Time Machine, which does an incremental backup in the background every few minutes (if you set it to), all you have to do is hit CMD-s after every paragraph. It’s a habit with me. (CMD is the key with the four-leaf clover on it.)
January 26, 2010, 7:33 pmShelbyC says:
or just ctrl-S, of course.
January 26, 2010, 7:54 pmSun Tzu's Nephew says:
Or Word for Windows has a setting for saving every x minutes….
Or use OpenOffice…fully compatible with Office, not nearly as craptacular.
And FREE!
January 26, 2010, 8:02 pmkarrde says:
CDU: I remember a slightly different version, which ended something like “Jesus Saves, but Jesus also Backs Up.”
Because, of course, the Devil was smart enough to save his work, but not smart enough to use external backups…
January 26, 2010, 8:24 pmCornellian says:
Word for Mac isn’t any more or less stable than Word for Windows – you should avoid both of them if you have a choice.
For long documents (e.g. law review articles as opposed to 2 page letters), something like Scrivener is probably a better bet.
January 26, 2010, 9:42 pmOren says:
One of the advantages of using LaTeX for your documents — you have to save to render and you have to render to see what it looks like.
Oh, and what everyone else said.
January 26, 2010, 9:49 pmcjc says:
Yes, the “autosave” setting configured to fire off every 5 minutes.
One thing no one has mentioned regarding backup is that you should always have an off-site backup, in case the house burns down, or bandits break in and take all the shiny computer equipment (ask Francis Ford Coppola about that:
http://www.cinematical.com/2007/09/29/thieves-steal-francis-ford-coppolas-everything/
There are services that do that sort of thing, like Mozy and Carbonite (and probably some Apple-specific thing). There’s also programs like JungleDisk which you can buy, which uses Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service to host the backup. These things run in the background, and sync up with the cloud every few hours.
January 26, 2010, 9:55 pmWilliam H. Stoddard says:
That happens to me with Word for Mac fairly regularly . . . and I use it professionally copy editing books for scholarly presses. I have System X.6.2 and Word 12.2.0. The problem seems less severe than with earlier versions, but I still have to deal with crashes, and I still hit Save every couple of pages. For some reason spell checking is especially unstable in Word.
I don’t have that kind of problems with any other software I use; just with Word.
January 26, 2010, 10:27 pmGM says:
DropBox.com is awesome and free (for 2GB of back-up storage), it backs up and syncs across multiple computers (so all of my work is saved on my laptop in a folder, on my office computer and in “the cloud”), I also have a folder that I share with my RA’s for them to dump documents into (that folder is also shared across all my computers but they can only see that one folder).
I realize this is too late to help you now, but I highly recommend the program.
January 26, 2010, 10:29 pmGaryC says:
Microsoft Word is the anti-beer.
Proof that God exists and that he hates us.
January 26, 2010, 10:39 pmAnondson says:
I’ve done a lot of work editing 100+ documents in Word over the years. I had to put up with crashing and bombing with resignation. I still get my work in .doc format, but I convert the files to Pages (iWork) to do my work, then export it back in .doc format. My life has been made so much easier! I WILL NOT work in MS Word (any platform any version) anymore.
That’s not to say Pages couldn’t be better, there are features I’d like that Word has that were nice. But not at the expense of my sanity, and I can still work without them. Pages is not perfect and may not be the best choice for your work. It is a great solution for me. Good luck finding a good solution.
January 26, 2010, 10:42 pmKenneth Anderson says:
h2u – thanks – I’ll ask if I need more help – I’m using office 2008 and 10.6 – so it all seems weird to me.
January 26, 2010, 10:53 pmh2u says:
Kenneth, if you’re up to date with all your software then it may be time to follow the advice of other conspirators and ditch the MS suite of software.
OpenOffice is a great product and runs pretty well on a Mac. There’s also the iWork application suite which is highly integrated into the Mac platform. And, of course, there’s Google Documents which is a pretty good choice if you’re comfortable with Google “controlling” your content.
January 26, 2010, 11:20 pmAS says:
I have difficulty imagining working for 9 hours on a document without saving. Mac OSX puts a little dot on the close button (the red one in the upper left corner) whenever you have made unsaved changes and I’ve trained myself Pavlov style to reflexively hit command-s whenever I see that in my peripheral vision. I get a little pit of anxiety in my stomach every time I see that unsaved changes dot.
I’d recommend the same sort of self-training to others. Small doses of fear/anxiety over unsaved data are much much healthier than large doses of fear/anxiety over lost data.
January 26, 2010, 11:26 pmJames N. Gibson says:
This is interesting since I’m using OS 10.4 and what was then called Office X. I never get a low memory call out since the software shouldn’t have fixed memory amounts allocated to the packages (at least not since OS 10.0).
January 27, 2010, 1:12 amyankee says:
Years and years ago I trained myself to hit ctrl-s frequently. It’s an unconscious habit now, to the point where I sometimes save multiple times while thinking abut what I’m going to say next.
It’s excessive, but I’ve never lost more than half a sentence worth of work.
January 27, 2010, 1:39 amPeteP says:
“Learn the keyboard sequence for ‘save’ on the program you use most. (It’s alt-f, s on most Windows programs.) And get used to hitting it automatically right as you finish typing one thing and pause to think about the next.”
Yes. Thsi should be in your ‘muscle memory’ so you don’t even think about it.
And further, get as familiar with ‘alt-f, a , ‘Save As’, and be in the habit of saving invremental versions as you go.
Nothing quite like finding out that something ( lord knows what ) corrupted that last ‘Save’, like having the Save itself give you an error message !
January 27, 2010, 8:19 amhugh says:
I agree with the people advocating a learned reflex to hit CONTROL-S (or whatever the Mac equivalent is).
One more piece of advice: save to new files regularly. On older (circa 1998) versions of MS Word, a computer crash would corrupt the current file and make it unopenable. Oh the frustration of having SAVED the document, but not being able to open it. I could view it, but not edit it or cut and paste from it. Days of work lost. Now I save to a new file at thje start of every day and also whenever I make a major editorial change.
January 27, 2010, 10:54 amKevin Coates says:
As you’re on a Mac, you might also want to check out Foreversave. It effectively automates hitting Cmd-S in any application, and also keeps different versions of your documents if you want it to, again automatically.
Set it, forget it, and never lose your work again.
No affiliation, just a user.
PS As many others have said, leave Word behind if you can…
January 27, 2010, 11:29 amOren says:
Surely you can open it in a straight text editor and excise the useful information. At the very minimum, you can drop to a terminal and run it through a ASCII filter — that would probably be better than rewriting from scratch.
January 27, 2010, 12:05 pmanonymous says:
Prof. Anderson:
I’m sorry to hear it, and can empathize. It’s not just you. I also write using the latest version of Word for Mac (2008 version with latest updates/patches installed) and Mac OS 10.6.2.
I’ve also had a few crashes at inopportune moments, often (although not only) shortly before filing deadlines, as I’m scrolling through the document (or another reference document that’s open in another window) quickly. It’s exceptionally frustrating; even when I’m confident I’ve saved recently, there’s the time it takes to reconstruct where the changes I’ve inputted before the crash have disapppeared because of the crash.
I find that I keep saving new versions, v.01, v.02, v.03 with increasing frequency as I get closer to deadline, often a new version every half-hour or hour as the deadline nears.
January 27, 2010, 12:30 pmSigivald says:
Even more important, TEST the backups now and then.
It’s not a backup until you’ve proven it can be restored and work.
(Important stuff probably should be in multiple locations on-site AND somewhere off-site, though that can be tricky with live edits.
And make sure autosave is on in your editor, if you’re not in the habit of manually saving often.
Which is a habit you probably should cultivate, for that matter. Especially if you don’t have a UPS on your computer.)
Oren: Word (and Excel) files aren’t annotated plaintext. They’re a complex binary format. Reasons for that are partly historical and partly practical. (That said, if one doesn’t need the crazy capabilities of Word, one can use RTF, which is a lot like plaintext, and is more recoverable.)
January 27, 2010, 1:34 pmChuck says:
That happened to me after several hours of working on an important document in Word 3.0 for the Mac (known to some as the world’s largest beta test). To this day, I reflexively hit Command-S (Control-S in windows) after every sentence, sometimes after every few words. It is just a habit now; a very good habit that has saved my sanity several times over the years.
January 27, 2010, 3:06 pmTo Have and Have Not says:
Maybe it’s time to persuade WordPerfect to start writing Mac versions again. I’m in an office that runs Windows, but we have both MS Word and WordPerfect. I’ve had a very tiny fraction of the problems with WordPerfect that I’ve had with Word. And my experience is typical of that of nearly all of my colleagues.
January 27, 2010, 5:28 pmDyspeptic Curmidgeon says:
1) a) Turn on autosave, or even b) use subversion for automagic version control.
January 27, 2010, 5:50 pm2) Backup your data folders using cron, every evening to…
a) Another computer;
b) A hidden Network Attached Storage device, such as the WD MyBook World box (about $200/ 1Terabyte) or the Tonido-PLug (about $100, uses USB attached storage). These are network attached so they can be hidden somewhere at the end of a network cable running off your router.
c) Most high-speed ISP suppliers provide on-line storage. Mine gives me a free 100G accessible by ftp or similar programs. Easy enough to encrypt a zip file or tarball and store it there. That would meet the ‘what if there is a fire’ safe standard.