i didnt save thyis morning! Woke up at 4am. Didnt save. Now at uni. AGRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH So stupid!!
Anyone of yous done something this stupid?!

save what? your work?

My computer has an inbuilt function which analyses how long it was since your last save and runs complex algorithms to determine the importance of your work and how close to the deadline it is. If the work matches all these criteria, it will promptly crash without saving.

I have managed to fill the hard drive on my mass spec, so it is refusing to do any more analysis cos it has nowhere to store the data. Not a problem, except that it's also decided it's fallen out with the flash drive and the CD writer.

In finest electronic tradition, it has managed to do this with my Friday deadline looming.

Glad I do my writing the old fashioned way, in a hardback book.

Deepest sympathies, I have done that once or twice but not v.imp things. I do't know if you are using microsoft word for writing, if it is then go to tools -options-save it wil give you fast save and autorecovery after anytime you want (even 1 minute). so hopefully this will decrease your damage limit to a certain extent.

The autosave is, in theory, okay. The trouble is when you're working with a big document and it taking ages to autosave, so you have to halt halfway through a sentence because the computer won't do anything. Frustrating!

am so sorry driven2insanity. that once happened to me after i spent a whole day writing a paper that i was hoping to publish. when i was done i send it to print and logged off only to check the printer and there was no paper and neither was the paper saved on the comp. its so easy to be furious, but it doesn't make the work come back. take sometime off and come back again, take a deep breath and redo it. stuff happens.

I agree with sly (used a sort form). It can be a pain, but damage control is the key word, so you limit the damage of loosing all your work as sometimes it cannot simply be written again no matter how hard you try,.So do cost benefit analysis if you want but I recommend fast save at least.

thank you very much for the sympathy. i have just done that autosave stuff. Uusally quite good with this stuff dont know what has got into me. Hope you are all ok!

Sorry to hear of your woes, driven2... and thanks for the reminder. I've just backed up three months' work onto my external hard disk!

speak of the devil - i lost part of my work today. it just disappeared from my screen two hours to handing in and i really panicked - anyhow, i wrote a sketchy version of it and handed it in. i wasn't very amused, but these things happen.

Just another small point or two
1. Always save your work before you send it to print, not the other way round, the print command can do strange things sometimes, and this will mean you will not loose the work.
2. Keep cats away from the keyboard - my daughter lost one of her undergrad essays when the cat managed to delete the lot.
3.Keep a backup copy of all your work, at one stage I had work on two computers, a memory stick and a CD - just in case - oh, and a printed out copy.