If you haven’t had a computer hard drive kick on you, or never have had a document go sour, you aren’t blessed. Your time will come.

Common sense, now that’s another story. There’s no app for that.

When I was in college 15 years ago, I learned about document corruption the hard way. You’ve heard a similar story, or even have had your own: I had a 25-page final paper due, and, as usual, I was pushing the deadline, frantically working to get it finished in time for class. A sage once told me to save every three minutes, so that’s what I did.

When I inserted my floppy (!) in the school PC for printing, the computer could not open the file. The floppy was corrupted. Thing is, I didn’t save a copy on my home hard drive; I simply worked on the diskette. This was my only copy.

I eventually recovered about 65 percent of my document — after hours of repairing the diskette sector by sector.

Thankfully, today’s technology offers dozens of methods to ensure our work isn’t lost — Google Docs, Dropbox, plain-jane e-mail attachments, vast backup drives, etc. Even if work is corrupted, recovery options abound. (Common sense, now that’s another story. There’s no app for that.) Read more…

Jenny Sweeney How To document corruption, Dropbox, Excel, floppy diskette, Google Docs, Word