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An hours work - lost in an instant. How?
Dunnroamin
Posts: 2,437
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A couple of days ago I was constructing a post for the Politics forum. As is my way, I spent a lot of time correcting, checking and revising (I guess the whole thing took me about an hour), when I was satisfied with the end product I did one final press of the Preview Post button to see how the post would look and read and got a "Page expired" notice, or something similar and a box telling me the internet connection had failed, when in fact, it had not. Of course, I lost everything, a whole hour's work gone. Needles to say, I was a little "peeved". This is not the first time this has happened to me (it happened once before with a different broadband package). I have now started saving my posts into My Documents, with the idea that, should I suffer a similar loss again, I might be able to "paste" the text saved in My Docs onto the DS Message panel. Is this feasible, and does anyone have an answer as to what might have caused the loss of the original post, and is there a way I might have retrieved it?
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I suppose you could compose your posts in Notepad or similar then copy and paste them in the DS Message box, that way you could take as long as you like.
If I'm drafting a long post, I use two approaches. For most, I simply "copy all" to the clipboard from time to time.
If my post includes a number of links, or is being drafted using data from several web pages, then I use Windows 7 'Sticky notes'. These enable you to include copy+paste from web pages as well as c+p urls. Having edited it to it's final state, you can copy the whole lot into the posting box, and urls will be transferred in a useable state.
That's more effort then all the country's politicians put in on an average day. Plus they get generous expenses, subsidised food and booze, travel and 2nd houses all paid for !
Just to add to the other posts, when this kind of thing has happened to me I have usually managed to retrieve it by carefully using the "Back" button, which in most cases returns you to the "Edit" box and allows you to do a quick copy-paste of the contents into Notepad or similar. You can then re-engage with the thread and paste/continue.
The most important thing is "Don't Panic" and give yourself time to think about it - before doing anything else!
....... the word processing is done in your browser on your computer. only "post" actually contacts the internet. by which time, for example, that particular thread might have been removed by the mods ........
....as said use browser back button. the text should still be there because its on your computer regardless of whether the post worked or internet still there ........
...... so yes u can save if necessary but dont have to worry about constant niggling copy and paste ......
...... although to be quite sure, put your browser "offline" before hiting the back button ....
Admin edit: Keep it to one post, please.
There is no need to use a text editor or wordprocessor to do this copying to clipboard is enough so you can paste into reply box.
I have Firefox, but seems it is available for Chrome too.
Just right click in a Reply Field and Recover Text. Enjoy.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&gl=uk&q=lazarus+form+reocvery
if youre spending 1 hour on a post then many other computer glitches could occur and copy text to somewhere on hard disk is probably good idea.
People press CTRL and A instead of Shift and A and.... well you should know what happens next when all your text is highlighted and you click a key.... gone.
If you are doing something as big as a post that could take up to an hour to write, I wouldn't rely on just the clipboard. That's long enough time that the computer could crash and you'd lost the clipboard contents, too.
If you are writing anything on a computer that is taking a lot of time and effort, do it in a text editor (be it Notepad or Word) and save it at regular intervals. That way, even if there is a power failure, you've only ever lost a few minutes work at most.
It reminds me of the days back before Office applications have autosave and recovery features. I'd get called by someone who'd spent the entire day working on a document, but never saved it once. Then the computer crashed and they lost 7 hours of work. Moral of the story; if you are worried about losing it, save it.
That suggestion by you and others makes sense, thanks to you and them. D
If I were you I'd strongly consider getting a life.
What does os stand for on the politics forum?
That would be the best thing to do, in my opinion.