Sunday, June 27, 2010

SCREWED

I have just lost the next two posts of this blog -- one on the Prisoner's Dilemma, the other on the Free Rider Problem. I was cruising along, writing in WORD [Windows Vista] when I hit a key [I don't know which one] and everything in the file disappeared. I have done everything I can think of -- I went online and found official Microsoft instructions for finding lost files. No luck. It simply does not seem to be anywhere, even though my version of WORD is set to make an automatic backup every three minutes.

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. I am too old for this! I am going back to a pen and a pad with a carbon sheet under every page. I just do not know whether I can rewrite the thirteen pages or so that I have just lost.

3 comments:

  1. How awful!

    You might try to locate the hard copies of the Word autorecovery files on your computer. They have extension .ASD -- which means you can find them all by going to Start > Search > Files and Folders, and enter "*.asd" (without the quotes). If YourDocumentTitle.asd pops up, open it up and see if it's got your text. (I'm assuming you're using Windows here...)

    What a bummer. In the future, you might consider online backup. There's a discussion on the Lifehacker blog about your options here. Good luck!

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  2. Thanks, Bryan. I tried that, and got nowhere. I found something in my trash basket that looked promising, so I clicked on the "restore" button and the damned thing disappeared. Now I can't find that either. I am going to see a movie and have some Goobers, and then quietly begin the task of re-writing the entire thing I lost.

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  3. That is dreadful. I am sorry it happened and if Bryan's suggestion doesn't work I'm afraid it's gone. (If you still have the document open since the mishap, you could try CTRL-Z several times to undo changes.) I suggest installing Dropbox (one of the online backup solutions Bryan mentions) to avoid future mishaps. It's available for free at www.dropbox.com, backs up your documents online and on any other computer you'd like, and keeps a backlog of older versions of your files for the past 30 days. (I find it convenient to place the "My Dropbox" folder in the desktop [the background screen in Vista], and place all the important docs and works in progress there.)

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