Right. An app can update these files very quickly as you modify a document, which it couldn’t do if it was trying to perform a full save. And when you do save the file, all that recovery data is deleted.
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Could it be the result of a virusscanner putting these files in quarantine because of a false positive during malware scanning?
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Sorry to say, this reminds me of the reason I stopped using Word for long-form writing. I hit SAVE religiously as I’m working, and still my docs went missing. It seems like Word did not really save the whole document, but some kind of temp file(s) which eventually just vanished due to some kind of bug. Hours with file recovery did not get them back, and then I started to read of others having the same problem.
I finally had enough and started using Apache Open Office. Honestly, it’s not as good as Word, and has its own problems, but at least I know where the files are! I hope that’s not what happened in this case, but it kind of fits the pattern, ie, the files never actually existed in the first place because they were never exported or Saved As.
If they were ever printed or made into a PDF that could be scanned back in…
I’m subscribing to be notified when this mystery is solved!
I called somebody the other day and left them a voicemail. They claimed that they couldn’t find it.
After several days they realised that voicemail on their cell number was still a thing and used the Phone app to listen to my voicemail.
Prior to that they had been scouring social media apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.
The moral of the story is to challenge all assumptions.
Just a quick suggestion: I, too, was an Open Office user but switched a couple of years ago to Libre Office because of security concerns and update frequency. For me, the change was pretty much seamless.
Thanks for the tip, I may check it out!
The LibreOffice project is a fork from OpenOffice, which was created after Oracle took over OpenOffice, due to many in the community being afraid that Oracle wouldn’t play nice with the open source community. Then Oracle gave the project to Apache, which (I assume) satisfied the community, but at that point, the fork was already done.
And LibreOffice seems to have have quite a lot more releases over the years.
And just to make life more interesting, there was also a “NeoOffice” fork, designed as a Mac-specific port. But that project has pretty much folded, with a recommendation for Mac users to move to LibreOffice.
Fortunately, since all of these are forks of the same code base, they are pretty much interoperable with each other.
See also the Wikipedia timeline:
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I think that’s the bug I remember from what I think was Word 97. I was working on a big project and saving diligently until Word crashed and everything was gone – until I came up with a trick to get it back. I can’t remember the details, but the bug was caused by each save counting as one in a limited number of files that could be open at the time. I started closing files and was able to recover. A month or so later I was talking to a guy I was consulting with when he hit the big. I was able to talk him through recovering the files. It was a really nasty bug that I don’t think was ever fixed.
NeoOffice died largely because the project leaders cut themselves off from their users.
I had been an avid user of NeoOffice. At one point, I was notified that there was an update available. I tried to install the update, but couldn’t because it had been more than a year since I had last donated to the project. (Mandatory donations for upgrades are strike one. If you want steady income, make it a license fee, either per version or by subscription. There are open source licenses that allow for normal license fees.)
So I went to the website to donate again. And found that I couldn’t donate at all because I hadn’t donated in the past year. They had decided to cut off new users because they were the source of the majority of their customer service requests, and they just didn’t have the time or patience for dealing with that. (Cutting off the supply of new users is strike two. Existing users alone cannot sustain your project, because all users will eventually stop using it.)
I attempted to contact them to find a way to get around the cutoff, because I wasn’t a new user; I just hadn’t donated within their arbitrary cutoff. I also wanted to offer my services as a volunteer in customer support. But they had also cut off the ability for anyone who wasn’t a current supporter to contact them at all. (Cutting off user communication? Strike three, you’re out. An open source project with no way for anyone to contribute who isn’t already involved is dead for the same reason as relying on only continuing users: everyone will eventually leave the project if it lasts long enough.)
I posted a lengthy explanation of these problems on Twitter and tagged them, hoping they might see it and make some changes, but nope, they persisted in cutting themselves off from everything that could have saved the project. With no ability to add new supporters, either financial supporters or volunteer contributors, they stagnated themselves into irrelevancy.
They should be an object lesson in how to kill an open source project.
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Most open source licenses don’t prohibit requiring payment for the software. They require that the source code be made available, but they usually say nothing at all about binary availability.
So you can release a massive open source project and charge $10,000 for a binary distribution of the software, while simultaneously making source code available to those who want to build their own copies.
Depending on the nature of the product, this might even make sense. For example, RedHat Enterprise Linux is distributed like this. You need to pay for it, and the prices are not cheap, but anyone can download the sources and compile their own copy of the distribution, if they are so inclined. (RedHat also supports free community-supported versions of their distribution, in the form of CentOS and Fedora.)
There was a feature in Word called “Fast Save” which only saved the changes…not the whole document. After having some troubles with Fast Save, I started doing regular saves.
This was probably back in Word 4 and Word 5.1 that I hit the problem. Does Word still do something similar to this in modern versions?
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The current Autorecover feature is similar to this. It saves only the changes, just not to the original file. As I recall, one problem with Fast Save was that appending the changes would sometimes corrupt other parts of the file, rendering the whole thing potentially useless. By separating the saved changes from the “regular” file, they could escape damaging the file in the process.
The other problem I recall was that Fast Save files couldn’t be read by any other app, because it was a deviation from the expected format of the data. But you couldn’t tell by looking at the file whether it had last been Fast Saved or regular saved. Another issue that was resolved by separating the recovery data from the regular file.
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After bad experiences with Word over the years I regularly use Save As with an update to the version number (eg my-report-V9.docx) and move the previous version(s) to an archive folder.