Why is my "AutoRecovery" function fickle?

January 10, 2006 12:23 PM

My office computer operates Windows XP with Word 2000. (I'm a Mac person at home so no lectures please...) About once a week or so, a Word doc will freeze up on me forcing me to hit the good old Ctrl+Alt+Del and End Task. I would say 50% of the time when I open Word again, the document I was working on comes up as a recovered document (phew!). The other 50% of the time, I open Word and... no recovered document (!!!). What gives? Why the discrepancy? How can I guarantee that a recovered document will come up all the time and not just when the computer feels like it? Aside from searching through a million temp files, is there an easy way to get the version I was working on back if it doesn't come up automatically? (Yes, I save as often as I can, but I'm only human.) Sorry if this has been answered before... I searched for a similar post, but didn't find one. Thank you!
posted by zharptitsa to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I think that it depends on how recently it was autosaved, but also what caused the crash.

Also, is it the same Word doc?

Maybe have your autosave happen more often?
posted by k8t at 12:26 PM on January 10, 2006

Right now my AutoRecover is scheduled to save every 3 minutes. When it recovers, it's almost always the exact same document that froze up (maybe a few sentences are missing). When it doesn't recover, I'm forced to go back to the version that was on the screen the last time I physically hit Ctrl+S.
posted by zharptitsa at 12:34 PM on January 10, 2006

my guess is its the autosave as well.
posted by xospecialk at 12:50 PM on January 10, 2006

I think the Word's recover function behavior is random, at best. You see, the program is recovering a document after a fatal crash caused by Eris knows what. When it recovers the document, as you noticed, it recovers from the auto-saved version. But depending on the severity and cause of the original crash, it won't be able even to know what document(s) it has been working with.

So, you can't really control the recovering, but you can do something about the crashes. As Word is somewhat stable, given the right environment, you should first check you have enough resources (memory, specially). Also, you should check for hardware problems (again, specially memory problems and specially if any other software is crashing frequently). Regardless the previous two procedures, you should (or ask your support to) desinstall and then reinstall Office. If that doesn't help, try OpenOffice (it will crash too, but then again it is free software so you can blame "those damn hippies").
posted by nkyad at 12:55 PM on January 10, 2006

Also, make sure you have service pack 3 for office installed. There's an off chance there may be some known bug causing the instability.


http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdate/default.aspx
posted by skallas at 1:14 PM on January 10, 2006

I had a similar problem: word on my office computer used to crash and destroy the saved doc I was working on. In addition to saving the document I used to mark (Ctrl+A) the whole thing and copy it to memory (Ctrl+C) so I could paste it into a fresh doc in case of a crash. Of course this is only a crutch until you get some IT support to solve the problem.
posted by ollsen at 1:19 PM on January 10, 2006

Couple of things.

1. At work, are you using Outlook on your computer to talk to an Exchange Server? If so, check to see if Outlook is Word as your email editor (don't have Outlook here, so I can't tell you the exact steps, but it's in the Options dialog). If so, turn this off. Unfortunately, sometimes when Outlook can't find talk to the Exchange server, it will temporarily lock up Word. I've had this last as long as 5 minutes. Normally, it will eventually return, but not always.

2. nkyad is not exactly right about the randomness. Word's recover behavior is deterministic. Word is checking it's working directory for files and temp files, checking their timestamps, and even looking inside them at specific "quicksave" information. There are files that Word either cannot open (corruption, file locks etc), or whose quicksave data doesn't match what Word expects, etc. Word will not offer to recover these.

3. Once you have killed Word's process, don't just relaunch it. Reboot Windows; this will help to remove any file locks that might still be held on the files that Word needs. It will also help to temporarily clear whatever problem is causing Word to lock up. Once you've rebooted, see if Word offers to recover the file you lost.

At heart, there's a problem that needs to be fixed. If Outlook/Exchange is not temporarily locking up Word, there's a larger problem on your computer that needs looking at.
posted by Dunwitty at 4:18 PM on January 10, 2006

crap.

"check to see if Outlook is USING Word as your email editor"
posted by Dunwitty at 4:19 PM on January 10, 2006

Sorry if I didn't' made myself clear: obviously Word's behavior is deterministic, what I meant to say is that the outcome of the crash-recover process is unknowable in advance and ultimately uncontrollable, since you can't control the crash causes and degree of severity. So there is a chance Word will be able to find the right file again. There is a chance it will not. For all practical purposes, from the user perspective the file recovery (or not) is a random event.
posted by nkyad at 5:32 AM on January 11, 2006