Ack! It Ate My Post!

Most of us have had the miserable experience of working long and hard on an e-mail or review or newsgroup post, only to have it vanish in a browser crash, timeout, or mysterious bug of unknown origins, usually accompanied by various gibberish messages regarding Javascripts. Typically, one is told to "save, save, save!" to avoid data loss -- and usually this is a good idea. But when the information only exists in the online form box, and there is no obvious save option, until it is posted, this advice is worthless. The worst of all is when you hit the "post" button itself and instead of uploading it vanishes into the ether, leaving the disgruntled author with the task of recreating the entire missive from scratch, knowing that those carefully crafted mots justes will not be remembered accurately.

After experiencing this a number of times, I've finally hit on a workaround that should help stop this happening, until the day arrives when we have programs and networks that never crash or timeout. The quick solution is to

1) periodically highlight the entire block of type that you've written so far, which may be easily done by hitting CTRL A,
    (though sometimes this highlights everything on screen, not just in the text form);

2) then hit CTRL C.

This will copy everything into the "clipboard" feature, saving it until something else is highlighted and copied. Then, if your form vaporizes or your browser spontaneously destructs, you can paste that stored text into another program, like Notepad or Word, and it won't be gone. You can do this either by mouse-clicking "paste" from the "Edit" menu, or by hitting the keyboard shortcut CTRL V. (No, I don't know why it's C/V instead of C/P for Copy/Paste, unless someone thought it would be easier to have them close together. It is, sometimes -- and other times you hit the wrong one. But that is the kludge we have inherited.)

The other alternative, which is a bit safer but also more laborious, is to create your entire message beforehand in another text program such as Notepad, save it, and then copy-paste it into the online form. But either of these will work to prevent total data loss.

WARNINGS:
If you don't hold down the CTRL key firmly, then you will replace your text with a single "c", thus causing the very problem you were trying to avoid. Fear not, however, simply hit CTRL Z instantly, and your action will be undone. Hold down the key more firmly next time -- proper keyboard attack and all that.

And if you forget and highlight and copy something else in another window meanwhile, that will oversave the first block of copy. If you think you may forget, it's not a bad idea to have Notepad open in the background, and just paste stuff into it as if it were a telephone doodle pad as you go along.

Also, none of this will help if your entire operating system goes down, or if your computer spontaneously destructs -- I mean, reboots.


(The Author only occasionally remembers to take her own advice, resulting in occasional data loss and snarling.)
 
 
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