nisus.com

Hi,

Although I'm usually very positive about NWE, I recently experienced a disaster situation using NWE and I have no idea how it happened. Here's the story:

I was at the University with my MacBook, using NWE to write out a 10-page group essay that was due the following day. I had a draft of the essay already written and I started out with that draft. We worked for about 5 hours. Every 15 minutes or so, I would diligently save the file. When we ended for the night, I simply closed the lid on my laptop and went home.

Later that night, I opened the laptop and since NWE was still open, the file I was working on came right up on the screen. I was quitting out of various applications and also quit NWE. Before quitting, it asked me if I wanted to save the file and I said yes.

The next morning (the day this paper was due), I opened the file from the night before and it had somehow reverted back to the ORIGINAL draft that I had started with from the evening before. I had lost all 5 hours of group work that we had put into the paper. Despite having repeatedly saved the file, somehow it had not saved properly. I tried opening the same file in Microsoft Word (just in case) and got the same thing. I tried looking through temp files, caches and any other possibility to find out if that file had been saved as something else on my hard-drive. Nothing.

Finally, we had no choice but to try our best to re-create all of our work in a rushed 2-hour period, as we had lost all the previously done work.

I don't know how this happened or how I can prevent it from happening again. My big mistake in all of this was that I did not save multiple versions of the file nor did I e-mail it to anyone to safeguard in the possibility that it was lost. I didn't even imagine that something like this could happen. If anyone has an explanation, I would be keen to hear back.

The lesson I learned for next time is that if I use NWE, I need to keep up backup copies of my work regularly. Just in case.

I don't know if you have ever tried out the utility called "File Buddy" but if the situation you've described had happened to me I would have started to have a look around the hard drive with File Buddy.

Years ago I have had things happen a bit like you have described and here's how File Buddy can help.

It's very likely that somewhere or other the file you had created with all the updates is sitting quite happily but hidden away.

With File Buddy you can peform very good disc searches for the title of the file using regular expressions and today the contents of files can be searched as well using regular expressions.

It could be that after a bit of searching your hard drive with various criteria you will turn up that missing file.

I don't know why the newer version of the file went missing. I do know that this can happen however.

We're you saving the changes to the NWX document manager or saving to a named file in the filesystem? Did you have NWX "Keep new documents in document manager without asking me" preference checked? Did you have autosave set on in preferences? If so, which autosave option was set - "overwrite existing files" or "to temporary backup files" and what was the autosave period? The preference settings for autosaving and the automatic and/or manual use of document manager in NWX are critical and can interact in unexpected ways if you're not careful.

The draft document you started with, was it created in NWX or another program (e.g. from another person)? Was it perhaps a MS Word doc that Nisus had converted to RTF?