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From: kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: 6.0.2  and Word
Message-ID: <84184@felix.UUCP>
Date: 22 Feb 89 15:27:08 GMT
References: <35727@bbn.COM> <730@wpi.WPI.EDU> <330@bridge2.3Com.Com> <866@wpi.wpi.edu> <348@bridge2.3Com.Com>
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Reply-To: kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
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In article <348@bridge2.3Com.Com> ngg@bridge2.3Com.com (Norman Goodger) writes:

>There is no guarantee that any file, specially if its a very large file
>that it will save properly, I don't care what computer your running, if 
>this is the case where the save trashed the file when it crashed then
>implies the other concepts of file security, ie if its VERY important,
>and you cannot afford to lose it, back it up. Or do a save as to another
>volume, that should protect your work. From the original posting it was
>easy to assume that this person did none of the above, he was not saving
>regularly, and created a very large file, and it was not backed up since
>it was obviously important enough to create a major problem for him..

I think that you are suggesting that he didn't save all day until that one
last time. I don't think you can work on one Word document for more than
a few hours without filling up the edit buffer, at which point you start
getting messages from Word to close windows.

If he was doing straight input for eight hours and not making lots of changes
or making heavy use of the clipboard, he might have been able to work for
eight hours without saving. 

I think the real safety tip you've offered here is alternate volume saves.
Perhaps you should keep a diskette in the drive and every hour or two, save
a copy of the document on a diskette as well as the regular (more frequent)
saves to the hard disk.

It's always a hard lesson when we first lose important work. In his case,
he may have been doing regular saves to the hard disk all day and it
was that final Save As, when he overwrote the single copy on the hard disk
that did him in.

>I think its logical to braek large documents into smaller documents, they
>can be easier to deal with and manipulate then large ones and perhaps can
>save one a real headache should something go wrong.... 15-20 pages should
>be a easily manipulatable document, though I am not sure how large the
>document that this person lost,

It's not very easy to break a single chapter of a book or manual into such
small documents. We regularly have 20-50 page chapters and do not run into
problems. I feel uncomfortable with anything much larger though.

>Perhaps Microsoft should include some computer
>and docuement safety tips in its manuals...but that should not replace
>common sense...

They do have several pages devoted to Long Documents (under that heading
in the encyclopedia-like manual). Basically the recommended maximum 
length for one document is 250 printed pages (.5 million characters).
But they recommend breaking long documents up into smaller, more manageable
documents and linking them.

Shirley Kehr