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Chapter 3. Keeping Track of Your Files a... > Setting Up Automatic Backup and Reco...
Setting Up Automatic Backup and Recovery Options
No roller coaster can compete with the sinking feeling you get when an Office program hangs, crashes, or simply disappears. With most programs, you can kiss your unsaved work goodbye. But Office 2007, like its predecessors, comes with “air bags” designed to make crashes less frequent, to make them less devastating when they do occur, and to increase your chances of recovering a document when Office does crash.
If an Office program crashes while you’re working on an open file, chances are good that you’ll be presented with the Office Document Recovery task pane (see Figure 3.13) when you restart the program. Documents that are listed as [Original] probably aren’t as up-to-date as those marked [Autosaved].
Figure 3.13. Office’s Document Recovery task pane appears on the left side of the screen.
Every item that was automatically saved during Automatic Recovery gets its own entry in the Document Recovery task pane. In some cases, the recovery procedure actually repairs damage caused by file corruption. Click any entry to open it, examine its contents, and decide whether to save or discard it. If you’re certain you know what to do with the item, click the arrow to the right of the item and choose whether to save it, view any repairs, or delete it. After you finish reviewing all recovered documents, close the Document Recovery task pane.
Note
Office 2003 included a tool called the Microsoft Office Application Recovery program, which you were supposed to remember to run if an Office program stopped responding. Only a tiny percentage of people even knew it existed, and even fewer remembered to use it when it was needed. So, in Office 2007 the document recovery feature runs automatically whenever Office determines that a program has hung up.
It is often worthwhile to save several recovered documents and compare the versions to see which (if any) have changes you want to save. To do so, click the down arrow to the right of the [Autosaved] filename and choose Save As.
Tip
Automatic Backup and Recovery—the “air bags for Office”—isn’t foolproof. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. It’s definitely not a substitute for saving your work regularly and keeping backup copies in a safe place. For projects that are especially important, burn your backups to a CD or copy them to a USB flash drive for extra protection.
