Monday Musings: The Importance of Saving in Earnest

Murphy’s Law states that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. I’d respectfully add “and at the worst possible time” to that adage...

“Hi, I’ve just come back to my computer and the document I was working on has gone.”
“OK, where was the file and when did you last save?”
“...”

These are among the worst calls we receive on our helpdesk. They are high-stress, as the agent taking the call knows there’s little that can be done, and the user placing the call has potentially lost hours of work. It’s a lose-lose situation and it’s hard to extol the virtues of saving regularly to someone who’ll be working through the night to catch up on the wasted hours. If the file resided on a corporate network, the usual answer is to go to the previous night’s backup. If the file resided on the local device, or worse still was never saved in the first place then the chances of recovery are slim to none. The worst part is that these scenarios are nearly always avoidable. Here are some tips to keep you as far away from this predicament as possible:

• As soon as you create a file, save it in an appropriate location. How many times have you just opened a document editor and started typing away? Don’t. Open a document, give it a title and save it straight away. Remember, auto-save can’t save if it doesn’t know where you want the file.
• Love thy save button. Or Alt-F-S/Ctrl S. Take a few minute to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your document editor’s save command, and every time you pause to read your document, stretch your arms etc, use the shortcut. Do not rely on auto-save, it should be considered as secondary to a good saving habit.
• If the document came in on an email attachment, save that attachment to a location somewhere in a document folder first, don’t work on the copy in the email. Don’t say we didn’t tell you so. More on that next week.
• If the document is important make a copy, and keep that copy somewhere else. It’s no good making a duplicate copy on the same device as the original – what if that device breaks or is stolen!
• If you are working on a corporate network find out if the drive you are working from is backed up on a regular basis...better still find out if that drive has a form of CDP (Continuous Data Protection) running.

That’s it for this Monday. Hopefully you won’t be calling us to recover lost files anytime soon! If you’re interested in any of the solutions mentioned in this musing, contact us on 0845 370 3350 or at sales@agile-it.net. If you’d like to discuss today’s musing, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.