You have all been party to my struggles with my PC, commonly known as Beelzebub. I've tried to give credit where credit's due, even giving him a whole post where I highlighted all the things I liked about him and was grateful for. This, I understand, is an approach that is recommended for conflict resolution by relationship counselors.
Well, that's it! I've tried. And what happened this week? He suddenly froze. Well, he does that sometimes and I am even prepared to be moderately understanding. Even Homer nods, or in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy terms, even if you have a brain the size of a planet you need a bit of downtime.
So I switched off, went through and made a cup of coffee then switched on again, safe in the knowledge that the autosave was on and when I came back I would have a choice of two versions, possibly lacking the last couple of lines I'd written - annoying, but no more than that. And even if there was some problem, everything I write is automatically saved to One Drive.
Not this time. The chapter I'd been working on all week came up with an error message, Unable to Open. Alarmed, I followed the suggested instructions to find Open and Repair. The slight snag here was that to repair it, I would have had to open it and it wouldn't open.
So I went on to One Drive. Yes, there was all my stuff, neatly backed up, including the affected chapter. It had backed up the corruption as well.
In full panic mode I contacted Jim, my go-to guy, begging him to come round instantly. He listened as I explained and then he said, 'No point. There's nothing I could do and I'm not going to waste your money.'
Then he said, which chilled me to the bottom of my soul, 'Lucky it was only a chapter.'
I've always worked on separate chapters, only combining them at the end. But I had actually been thinking maybe it would be easier to have them all combined rather than dotting to and fro to make changes. Perhaps it was my guardian angel that forced Beelzebub to show his dastardly hand before he got the chance to destroy 65,00 words and eight months' work.
I spent the end of last week trying to reconstruct what I had lost and it's been like pulling teeth. In the middle of it, as I rooted round trying everything, I got a notice from Microsoft asking me to lodge a report with feedback. Oh boy, they got it!
5 comments:
It IS rough, isn't it, trying to recreate all that went on in your mind and heart the first time round.
I've just spent all weekend (and I mean the three-day long weekend it's been here in Ontario) reconstructing all my programs and personal modifications etc etc etc, after a crash. Somehow, however, ALL my data was safe. Not sure how.
Technology: love/hate relationship, eh?
Sometimes more one than the other, as you say, Susan. Guess which it is at the moment with me? Glad you managed to save your data, though.
You might try looking at the file with LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice). It is a free package similar to MS Office. I've found it can sometimes reconstruct an MS office file when even Ms office itself cannot.
Hi to all! I'm just curious... does this type of crash/error happen as often when using MS Office on the Mac? I've used PCs for years and had a few occasions when I lost a version of a chapter but thankfully never the whole thing. Last year, I bought a refurbished Macbook Pro so I could learn the Apple OS at my own pace. Haven't switched any real work over to it yet and not sure when/if I'll do that. I'm wondering if the Word/Office problems happen more on the PC side or on the Mac side or if the grief is evenly distributed?
Tanya
Thanks for your advice Dave. I tried it, but sadly that chapter had gone. Kind thought, though!
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