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Re: Can it be recovered???



Glad to be of help. I had noticed in the past the many MicroSoft
files seem to grow FAR beyond what would be expected. I've 'looked
into' a few of them and seen what looks like intermediate saves.
Ludwik verifies that this is so!

PC folks might want to look into a similar shareware utility for
extracting text from otherwise 'lost' documents.

You loose any formatting and fancy stuff but it seems to work on text.

Hugh Haskell uses a utility that automatically saves every keystroke
to a file. A weeks worth of this file contains EVERYTHING you've
typed all week!!!

Maybe if we're extra nice to Hugh, he'll clue us in to the name and
availability of HIS solution to this ubiquitous problem.

Well, all right. Now that the dust seems to have settled, I'll let
the secret out. the utility I use is called "Last Resort." It is a
product of Working Software, Inc., located in Santa Cruz, CA. Their
address & phone #s are (found in a few seconds of searching with
Sherlock 2):


Working Software, Inc.

P.O. Box 5190

Santa Cruz, CA 95063-5190


(831) 423-5696

FAX (831) 423-5699

e-mail: info@working.com
<http://www.working.com/>

In addition to Last Resort (which is available for Mac & Windows)
they make several other nifty utilities, which you can check out on
their website. Their products can be purchased on line.

I am a firm believer in Last Resort. It has saved my bacon on more
than one occasion. The program opens a new file every time you start
your machine, and stores them in the preferences folder (on a Mac--I
have no idea where they would hide them on a PC). About once a month,
I open that folder and trash all but the current file just to keep
things from getting too cluttered. When you need to recover something
that you have lost (keystrokes only--it won't help you if you haven't
learned to save in your graphics program), just open the last file
(on Macs it is saved in SimpleText), and look around until you find
the area where you were working on what you need. As noted it saves
only keystrokes, so you have to reconstruct your own formatting, and
sort out any editing that you did, since it just has the strokes
recorded in the order you did them and not where you did them.

It is, as you can see, a basic utility, with not many bells &
whistles, but it is stable as a rock, and has been working on my Macs
since 1991 with nary an upgrade. I have version 1.0 and the current
version is 1.1, so there hasn't been much evolutionary pressure on
this product. It was pretty good as it came out of the gate. It works
as well on a G3 with OS 9 as it did on a MacPlus with OS6.

BTW, Last Resort isn't the only utility of this sort out there. there
are others that I have heard of from time to time, but since L/R
works well for my needs I haven't felt the need to check out any of
the others. And of course MS Word has an auto-save feature that you
can use. I assume that most other word processors have similar
features.

I should point out, that L/R would probably not have helped Ludwik's
problem since it was older stuff that got inadvertently trashed, but
perhaps this strategy would have helped: One the catastrophe has been
realized, immediately close the document without saving it, and then
reopen it. this tosses away the damaged version and reverts to the
most recently saved version, which, hopefully was saved before the
major loss occurred. The previously saved version should have the
lost material still there, but of course all the stuff that you had
added in the version you just threw away is now gone. But this is
where L/R will save the day, since it has been dutifully saving all
the keystrokes you made during the current working session. Copy this
data from the L/R file to your document, restore the formatting, and
you are back in business (I hope).

I'm not on the payroll of Working Software (I wish I were), but I
like their stuff.

Hugh


--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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