How to back up or save a Word document automatically before your computer crashes!

Posted on March 10, 2007 at 8:45 pm

I’m sure this has happened to many people before: you are writing away in Word for an essay or whatever and you decide to take a quick break and go check out a video on YouTube. So you load up the browser and click on the video and WHAM! The video is not loading correctly and suddenly you can’t close IE and the toolbar disappears and then you just can’t do anything…except kill the computer and lose your Word Doc!

Well, if you take a little care in the begining, you can go ahead and shut the computer off and your document might still be there when you open Word the next time around (We can’t be certain, but you’ll have a better chance if you follow the next steps than if you don’t do anything!!!)

First thing, there are several features in Word that look like they will do a lot, but really will not protect your document and may actually make it corrupt! So to check out all the options we have for saving our documents, fire up Word and go to Tools and then Options and click on the Save tab:

The first three checkboxes are what we are going to look at and to explain what they do and whether you should enable them or not!

Always create backup copy: The way this option works is that if it is enabled, Word will create a previous version after your last save. In clearer terms, let’s say you open Word and start typing, but don’t save the document. This option BY ITSELF will do nothing and if your comptuer crashes, you will lose everything! Let’s say though that you do save it once, so now there is only ONE version of your doc as of right now. Still nothing! This option only comes into play on the second save, because now Word will take the data up to the first save and create a backup file with a .wbk extension. However, your current edits are not saved in the backup file. The backup file will only have the data up to the last save. So when you save the third time, everything up to your second save will be in the backup file.

Even though this option will not have the edits you made AFTER your last save, it’s still great if you’ve been working on a long document and you only wrote a couple of lines after your last save and Word dies, you’ll just have to re-write those few lines again. Of course, if you’re like me and you don’t save until after you’re an hour into your paper, then you’ll need the help of some of the other options!

Note: These files will start to add up quickly if you do a lot of saves, so it’s a good idea to clean them up manually every once in a while. Or if you have enough space on your computer, you can just leave them and not worry about it!

Allow Fast Saves: This options sounds cool, but can result in your files becoming corrupted! Basically a fast save is one in which Word simply takes your edits and appends it to the end of the file and doesn’t actually update the whole document with the theory that slapping it to the end of the file will make the save “faster”. However, this is apparently only true for VERY large documents, so it’s better to keep this unchecked.

Allow Background Saves: This option is a little tricky. After some reading up, I found out that this option does not “Save in the background” like you would hope. It doesn’t mean that while you are typing your paper, Word will just keep saving your document in the background! What it means is that if you have this box checked and YOU MANUALLY save your file, Word will do the save in the background so that you can continue to type! So you must still manually save the document! It’s fine to keep this on, but remember it doesn’t do anything to protect your document.

And the last option to talk about is also the one that might help you get your data back as close to the crash point as possible.

Save AutoRecover Info every: This option is a little confusing also. It does not mean that Word will automatically save your document by itself, what it does it create a separate file with a .ASD extension, which it will create at the interval you specify. So even with this option enabled, you should still try to do Ctrl+S as often as possible!

Anyway, after your computer starts back up, Word will load these files if it can find any of them. Remember though that these are temporary files and when you close Word, they are all deleted. The best option here is to keep this number as low as possible, something like 1 to 2 minutes. All of the temp files will be deleted after you close Word, so you don’t have to worry about them taking up a lot of space.

Hopefully this helps someone not have to re-type a whole paper, but remember that your best bet is to press Ctrl-S as often as possible! It’s only two key strokes, and it can save a ton of time and energy later on!

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» Filed Under MS Office Tips