serious techie question(s):

[fox]

so two things have happened recently:

1.  a friend of mine lost almost an entire chapter of her dissertation in a freak reverting-overwriting incident.  (fortunately, it was the most recent thing she's been working on and she's been able to reconstruct it, so it hasn't knocked her too far back.)  she has now learned the virtue of Save As rather than simply Save, and is in good enough shape that this comic strip made her laugh rather than cry.

2.  various networking things have changed here, meaning we're all required to go get our computers checked out, registered, examined, and installed with some additional software and whatnot by the end of the month or we won't be able to get online on the college network at all.  my appointment is the day after tomorrow.  this would concern me a lot less if i hadn't heard that the IT guys had managed to -- in another overwriting mishap, but you'd think they'd know better -- completely delete something like three years' worth of one guy's files, in addition of course to all his settings etc.

with these things in mind, i'm about to go out and buy an external hard drive, but i also wonder what everyone thinks about remote backup.  recommendations, etc?  thankee.  :-)

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between the thing that does backup copies of everything (dunno the name) and which does slow down Word, and this feature, which enables you to get your stuff back when there has been a crash/power cut/whatever. The secret is that it keeps every version for a long time in the Windows -> Application Data -> Microsoft -> Word folder, as ~WR*.wbk and ~WR*.tmp files, so chances are one of the versions she wants IS there.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

no, kenny is right -- what happened to my friend really was a completely freak accident, one in a zillion, where the thing somehow reverted to a previous version of what she was working on and she saved it before she realized it, so of course then it was too late. all these features are good things, but there's nothing that can prevent every single imaginable kind of disaster. fortunately she only lost the last chapter, and not the whole paper.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

All the same, tell her to go look in that folder - I always find the most amazing number of versions of my old stuff in it.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

well, she's redone it now, so the thing with her is more a lesson and less a matter of lost work at this point. :-) but, good to know.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Er... and it's Joe, not Kenny...

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

[looks]

why, so it is. my bad. (the 'k' threw me off.)

[kmg-365.livejournal.com]

The secret is that it keeps every version for a long time in the Windows -> Application Data -> Microsoft -> Word folder, as ~WR*.wbk and ~WR*.tmp files, so chances are one of the versions she wants IS there.

What OS are you using? My Application Data > Microsoft > Word folder contains nada. And it is under my profile directory.