Where the missing socks go

When I got home from work on Friday night, Linda was so mad she couldn't talk to me (without crying). According to Linda, her computer ate all of the edits that she made this week. Every change she saved has been lost.

I objected that she couldn't have lost all of her edits, and I checked through all of my backups. They showed that she had saved many times in the last week (and I had backups so everything should be fine). She acknowledged that she had saved many times, but still her changes are missing when she re-opens the file.

I admit, the unreliability of Linda's new laptop has had me almost pulling my hair out. But today we finally got to the bottom of the problem.

It was user error. Linda accidentally created two files containing the text of the same story, dreams. and dreams.spr. When I sat behind her and watched her work, she opened the first file, made some changes but saved it in the second file.

Consequently, when she went back, using the exact same methods, she opened the first file and it reflected no changes. Unfortunately, she has been making the mistake repeatedly this week saving older files over newer work. In fact, when she demoed for me this morning, she overwrote several hours of Friday's work.

Well. It didn't make her feel any better to know that it was just a mistake she was making, particularly when she was following directions I had given her. At least I was able to grab intact copies of her correctly-edited files for her. She'll still have to proof them again, but hopefully that will go quickly.

Fortunately, although her first impression was that the problem was wide-spread, it actually only affected the single story. And most important, now that we know why her files keep getting eaten, we can keep it from happening again.