Problem - Word & Toast experts only

[Wills]

I did a back up yesterday morning using Toast copying story files onto a CD - usual job every couple of days.

Later in the day I continued writing - done 4k words - and posted stuff up to the AH board. When I came back to Word I found that none of my writing had been saved since 11.19 in the morning, the precise time of the Toast back-up.

I work in Word using autosave every 5 mins. No autosave back up, no regular save back up and the story back up file has the same time line of 11.19.

Has anyone any knowledge of a compatibility problem between Toast and Word or any idea why Word would suspend saves? The icon at the foot of the page flicked, all day right on cue for auto save and the page refreshed every time I did a manual save - but nothing was saved.

I rebooted the comp. everything works now.

Will's

 

[Weird Harold]

I did a back up yesterday morning using Toast copying story files onto a CD - usual job every couple of days.

Later in the day I continued writing - done 4k words - and posted stuff up to the AH board. When I came back to Word I found that none of my writing had been saved since 11.19 in the morning, the precise time of the Toast back-up.

It would appear that Toast "Locked" your file while it made a read-only copy on the CD and then forgot to "unlock" it when it finished.

Locking and Unlocking files is a part of the Operating System file-sharing function -- What keeps keeps two programs (or users) from changing a file at the same time.

I've had occassional problems with MS Word 97 and/or Win 98 SE not unlocking a file after a "save As" conversion (especially from a Text format to a Word format.) Word sees the old file as "In Use" or "Read-Only" unti l exit Word and restart it. Word also sometimes leaves behind a "Hidden" Temporary file that should have been deleted when a file is closed. (you have to set your folder options to "show all files" to be able to see them.) The Temp files that Word uses are where the automatic save information is kept until you explicitly save the files; Your lost work might still be in a temporary file that was left behind because it couldn't write the changes to the main file when it was left locked (in use) by Toast.

Might I suggest that you check into Adaptec's DirectCD which is a better way to save copies of your work in case of a system crash?

DirectCD allows you use your CDW drive as a normal drive -- you just copy the files like you would copy them to any other folder, and you can keep adding to the CD until it's full or you "close the CD."

 

[ReadyOne]

I have real problems with Adaptex/Roxio. They just can't seem to get thier engine integrated properly into MS systems.

They went for months and months with mysteries at the time XP was released. Some could install, some could not install, fixes were issued to put on before installing, lots of problems were reported that Roxio couldn't reproduce...

Then MS picked up part of thier engine for use in XP and Media Player and we started getting conflicts when trying to use Roxio and then XP native CD writing support.

Long story short, try Nero http://www.nero.com/us/nero6-ultraedition.php trial download.