Averted disaster

Linda opened one of her word processing files, only to find large deletions in it. This hasn't happened for a couple of weeks consecutive now. The last time it happened, I created a virtual drive D: for her and told her to save backups there regularly. I take 5 minute snapshots of it and copy them to another computer. So today, when she told me she lost data, the first thing I did was open the change history from her backup directory and look at it.

I had the revision software display her most recently changed paragraphs in color, so she could look at them. The most recent version was still there. Then I compared it with the version she usually edits on drive C:, and the changes were missing there.

So what happened? She was faithful about saving a backup on drive D: and then forgot to go back to her original file. All morning, she was updating, changing, revising, and it was getting saved on D:. Then she came back this evening and opened the old C: file and got worried. It's the classic mistake of working on two files and not realizing which is current.

Really, it was the best possible mistake to make. Because of the ongoing snapshots, she can hardly lose anything she saves on D:. She could even have accidently copied the old file there and because of the revision history the mistake could be undone. I'm feeling pretty smart about the whole thing.

The only thing that might be better would be if the word processor automatically saved the backups for her. She wouldn't even have to think about it. Linda's wordprocessor can actually be dynamically reprogrammed (can't say that for Word) so I'll probably look into it eventually.