I seem to have lost a semi-important document, despite my diligent back-up strategies. And I cannot figure it out.
I have two external drives, Drive L and Drive K.
I keep all my data on L, and automatically back it up to K every night. I have been doing this for around a year now with no difficulties whatsoever.
Today, I tired to open a document in Word. This is a document I’ve opened, edited, saved, backed-up for at least a few years now. Today, though, I get an error message saying that this document created a serious error last time it was opened, and would I like to try and recover the data? Sure, I would. So, Word recovers the data, minus a lot of important formatting; just black text (I had a bunch of stuff color-coded).
No biggie, I think, I’ll just open up my back-up copy of the doc from Drive K. Here’s where it gets weird. The document does not exist on K. All of the other Word docs are there, nicely listed and alphabetized, but this one is missing.
Anyone have any sort of explanation for this? Or, even better, a solution?
Is the backup file set one huge file the backup program searches or are the files simply saved in regular windows doc or docx format searchable by windows explorer?
Also does your auto back up have an older file set you can search or do you just have one backup file set you constantly overwrite?
Is there a possibility that the file was open when the backup was made? Microsoft Word locks open documents and has caused problems with several backup systems I’ve used in the past.
By the way, if I understand your backup strategy, it has a massive flaw in it. If you screw up a document without noticing and save it to your disk, the screwed-up document will be copied over your backup that night.
On my Windows systems, I use a 7-day rotating backup system (one backup directory for each day of the week). If I screw something up, I have a week before my last good copy is overwritten. Since the stuff I’m backing up tends to be mission-critical (inventory management databases, for example), it’s highly unlikely I’d go a week without noticing. And whenever I make major changes, I do a “permanent” backup outside of the rotating daily system first.
On my Macs, I use Time Machine, so I don’t have to worry about this problem at all.
Yeah, capital letters aren’t a big deal. I was meaning if it had unusual characters, like punctuations marks or characters with accents.
I mean, I assume you are not using something that actually reads the files, so there should at least be the corrupted version on the drive. Even if word recovered the file from it’s own automated backup (which runs every 10 minutes in case the file gets corrupted), I would expect the automated backup file to be on the drive. Make sure you are looking at all files, including hidden ones.
Assuming you have XP use the search applet to search for all *.doc and *.docx files then sort by date. Make sure windows explorer file list has the “date modified” field. Right click on the top file bar to see the selection options.
If you have Win 7, the Win 7 search applet should have generated a master search file of the drives.
The individual word documents are saved. There is one main backup that contains all the word docs (this is done weekly and the previous one is deleted), and daily incremental backups - files that have no changes since the first are not copied.
I haven’t tried searching for the file, but I will.
I guess it’s possible that the file was open, but following (nightly) incremental backups should have copied the file, since it certainly was not open every night.
I don’t think the flaw you mention applies. While the messed-up doc would be copied that night, I’d still have the original copy from the preceding full backup (the screwed up doc would be copied during an incremental backup). My strategy is very similar to yours - I make a full backup copy of all docs on Monday night, then automatic incremental copies every other night until the next Monday, when another full backup is done.
As noted, I will search for the document. I’m not sure why this one would be hidden, though (?).
What backup software are you using? The reason I ask is that you say the files are backed up individually. That is not how most backup programs work. SOP is for the program to compress and aggregate the files either in zip, rar or some proprietary file format like qic. The only program I’ve ever seen that even gives you the option to save files individually is GFI Backup and that might only be an option when you chose zip compression - not sure.
So if the backup software is in fact saving files individually with no compression, the you are probably not doing true incremental backups. For programs that aggregate files into archives, the original archive will remain in tact and the incremental updates will take the form of new archives consisting of the new and modified files.
When I say it backs up the files individually, I mean that I select which folders to back up. The backed-up folders/files appear in the second hard drive as individual Word files, just as they appear in the main drive, so I assumed they were simply copies of the individual files. Is this incorrect?
mmm
If you are viewing the contents of the K drive in windows explorer and not through the Cobian software, then you are correct. The one exception would be if Explorer is set to show archives as directories. If that option is on, then when you see your file in the Explorer window, the directory will be some form of archive file (probably ZIP but possibly WinRAR). But in that case, I think Explorer is smart enough to know that when you do a search, it should also search in the archive files.