"When The Computer Eats Your Work" or "Fuck You, Microsoft Word!"
 

I've been working with a group of people on a large paper with many tables and figures and such in it, and one of them has word keep crashing on them, and losing all the information they typed up.

I keep telling them to save more often, but they never do.

I use OpenOffice (LibreOffice now?), and it's great, and you should use that instead of word.

I've always used OpenOffice here. Saved my ass a few times. I was writing a paper for my finals once, power failure. I was freaking out as I didn't think to save.

Thank god for it's "Autosave" function.

ABC stands for Always Back up Computer work. I've never lost anything memorable myself, except for this one time when I was just starting to use computers.

They had Mac desktops at this place* actually a newspaper office, of all things you could borrow, and I used to sit there all day for like a year until I got my first computer. Long story, but anyway these Macs were weird. I didn't know enough about them to write in notepad or anything, so I typed this novel I was writing right into the text prompt in an email to myself. And in these days I guess hotmail didn't have any draft backup system, at least none that I knew of.

And for some fucking reason these Macs had a key just right of the backspace key that had a symbol of a crossed-over rectangle on it, and the only function of this key as far as I knew was to screw you over in the worst way. When you pressed it, everything in your currently selected text prompt was deleted. It was deleted hard, with no backsies whatsoever. No undo, no paste, no insert, nothing could be done. I played around with this key for quite a bit when I first discovered it because I couldn't believe anyone would design something so evil. Even on a Macintosh. So, I'm pretty confident this is exactly what they key did. So I devoted a not insignificant amount of brain power to keep my fingers away from it at all times.

Except, of course, this one time. At the end of a 6 or 7 hour writing frenzy, I was in the zone, firing on all cylinders, ecstatic, a God creating, and my finger slipped when I hurried to backspace and super deleted my entire novel.

Now, I don't have any idea how much I had written , how much was left to write or if it would have been any good. But if I had to guess, taking into account my regular work habits, my youthful vigor at the time, the time I had spent obsessing over this story before beginning to write and the rate I've been known to work at in this state of mind, I may have lost about half of a NaNoWriMo novel with that one keystroke. It took about ten years before I tried writing the story again. (Turned out it wasn't very good.)

These days, I keep wanting to switch from Openoffice back to Word for little things like doubling up on spellchecking and word counting, and then my computer tells me I should by MS Office. So I guess I concur with the latter half of the sentiment in the tread topic.

I hope it wasn't a long lab.
 

Amake more or less hit it on the head. It isnt a matter of what program you use, there's the chance of crashing. If it can crash it will crash. Murphey's law and all that.

Backup, backup, and backup the backups. Dont rely on just one point of storage. I have multiples of all my documents backed up on at least two thumb drives, dropbox, an external hard drive, and such.

Making multiple back ups is very important to do no matter what it is.

It's always good to have 6+ copies of a project backed up across multiple storage devices and services.

I've had my fair share of GIMP being a dip shit once too many times to make a mistake now a days.

I print every time I type a line. It's hell on the rainforest but monkeys don't have to pass classes, do they?