Save Often

There is one piece of advice that I can give you. I tell users a lot of things, but this is one thing that I can’t emphasize enough. If there is anything I want you to get out of my whole blog here it is this:

SAVE OFTEN!

I don’t care what field are you in, or what kind of work you do. If you edit files (any files) using a computer, make sure you save your work as often as you can. This will save you a lot grief in the future.

You may think that this is obvious – but you would be amazed how many people fail to do this. They work on a Word document for 2-3 hours, there is a power outage, their computer crashes, or they accidentally close it without saving and have to start over. Don’t do that.

Train yourself to push Ctrl+S after every paragraph, or after every significant edit. Use the built in auto-save features. Hell, Word has a feature that will save all the previous versions of your work allowing you to revert to previous edits, merge different versions and etc.

Never wait to finish editing the file to save it – there are million things that can happen between now and then, and just about any of those things will cause you too loose some work. It is entirely up to you how much will you loose. Will it be 5 minutes, or 5 hours? You are in control here.

Save often… And keep many copies. The more copies you have, the less you have to worry about accidental deletion, hard drive failure and etc.

[tags]saving, save often, word, autosave, auto save, advice, it advice, rules to live by[/tags]

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3 Responses to Save Often

  1. Miloš UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    ahhhh…the story of my life…telling users to save and then backup regularly…when will they ever learn!?

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  2. Teague UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    Too funny!

    I work at a large private engineering/surveying firm, and we pretty much all use AutoCAD as well as various Office apps. We’ve had a couple of power outages here, and I always shake my head when I hear the chorus of groans. :) Or some individual’s PC will lock up and they’ll bitch for hours about all the time they lost.
    I guess being a game geek has its rewards, because I naturally save whatever I’m working on about every 2 minutes, and have whatever autosave functions there are on the various apps turned on.
    That’s what really surprises me: So many users don’t even have autosave turned on when it’s available!

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  3. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Same here. I constantly hit Ctrl+S or Esc :w and I can’t imagine why people don’t do that. The most work I can lose is few minutes. I can’t imagine working on a document for say 4 hours without ever saving it.

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