Word Autosave Feature

Alrighty.  I’m going to keep this one short(er) because I’m working harder than a first year lawyer at Skadden Arps. Since I’m not one of those guys with access to the in-firm gym, chef, and car service, I’d like to go home and get some dinner at some point.

 

Autosave.  It’s your best friend in the world, short of me of course.  It can prevent tremendous heartache, anxiety, headaches, and lost sleep – which I get having to deal with panicked lawyers who lost their work.  It might do the same for you.

 

Make sure you have this set up, particularly for MS-Word.  We all get engrossed in what we’re doing and forget to save the work.  Sometimes you might even leave to go home without saving your document and return to discover that the IT guys have rebooted your computer overnight.  That’s waking up to a nightmare for sure.  But if autosave was working happily along in the background all night, no problem.  You’ll be able to recover your doc.

 

So, in Word, you want to go to your “File” menu and select “Options.”  You should get a screen showing you “Save” as one of the things you can mess with.  In there, you should see something like “Save AutoRecover information every __ minutes” and “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving.”  Make sure both of those options are checked.  If you can select the minutes between saves, 5 minutes is a good number.  I type pretty fast, so 5 minutes means I might lose around 500 or so words in my document.  That’s about all I can tolerate.

 

The autorecover file location should also be pointing to someplace on your C: drive.  You’ll see that option, too.  It might say something like C:\Users\ehockman\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\.  That keeps it on your local hard drive where we can recover it.  You can point to a network drive, too, which might result in a nightly backup on our servers.  I need to ask iPower about that.