This is driving me crazy. I'm sitting in the library at Roosevelt (I had to return a very overdue book), trying to work on Arbitrary Passions. And I am finding, as I have found several times in the last few weeks, that minor edits I could have sworn I made are not actually made in the document. What other edits am I not remembering that have also gone missing???
And I don't know whether my memory is playing tricks on me -- did I only intend to make those changes and not actually implement them? Or have I somehow misplaced the most current version of the manuscript? Or did a revision crash and burn without me noticing at some point? Is Word not saving correctly? So very bewildering and so frustrating!!!
I suppose one fix would be to save revisions under a different name each time, so there is no question whether the save has been done properly.
I just started doing that. But it doesn’t answer the question of what was happening before, and what, if anything, was lost. Argh.
Oh my God this happens to me all the time! I hate it. I just did this last week. I could have sworn I’d made the edits. And then I made them all over again. Are they still there? I’m not sure. I can’t bear to look.
Sounds very frustrating.
If you use Spotlight on your Mac, and if you know any of the exact phrases that were in your changed version, you can search for them — just go to a Finder window and type the phrase into the search box at the upper right. But if you don’t know the exact words, that won’t help.
You could also use Spotlight to search for the filename — that would let you know if there are multiple copies of the document on your disk, assuming you gave them the same filename.
BBEdit has a neat feature that autosaves to a new file (in a special backup directory that you can specify) every n minutes, so even if there’s a crash it’s often possible to recover lost work. But I don’t think Word does that per se, and BBEdit isn’t really a good tool for writing a book-length document.