This probably is already known to most, but Word can be set up to save a
backup copy at whatever time interval you want, and it also has a pretty
good automatic recovery feature as well. I think the default for the backup
copies is "off", so be sure to turn it on on your copy of Word. - Don

Daniel Johnson wrote:
Way back in 1981, a little group of MIT guys formed Mark of the Unicorn
and went on to write a word processor, FinalWord, that had one wonderful
feature:  It maintained a swap file, a text database that was created
and maintained invisibly to the user, writing the current document to
floppy every 1K bytes or whenever the keyboard was inactive for M
seconds (M user-definable).  If the power went out, as it very often did
in the first 8 years I was a computer user, the doc was saved; worst
case scenario, the swap file was corrupted, in which case you ran the
recovery program to rebuild it.

I can't tell you how many hours of re-writing this saved me back then,
and I still use this little dos program for text creation because of
this safety feature.

Big programs need to have such disaster-recovery features built in as
well, and this little note about Africa and unreliable power reminded me
of this fact.

Dan Johnson md


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