Microsoft Word is one of the mainstay programs of most businesses. It is easy to use, well supported and the majority of candidates either come already familiar with its workings, or can be quickly and economically trained in how to use the program. It has the ability to create documents, tables, mailings, and presentations. With it being used to generate so many important documents for your business, including marketing and plans, it is essential that you have an effective backup process for Word along with a plan to recover Word projects should anything corrupt the files or happen to your storage systems.
Word Backup Settings and Processes
Word comes with settings options to select an auto save mode and to set the timeframe for its use as a form of data backup within the program. You can set the auto save mode for every minute to make sure that the latest changes to the document are preserved should the program crash. You can take this one step further by installing a third party backup program for your system and adjust the settings to once or twice daily. This will save all the data on your drive should the drive crash or become infected.
Many people have a policy of not saving Word documents to the hard drive but only to portable storage. While this is a good plan, it won’t prevent you from needing to restore Word documents. A file that is corrupted due to a system glitch will be saved with the corruption to the portable drive. It is also very possible for a sector area to go bad on the portable drive just as it can go bad on a hard drive. When this happens, you need a Word recovery program you can change drive settings on to target the portable drive.
After Reclaiming the File
Once you have run your Word repair program to fully restore Word documents onto your drives, there is one more step that has to be done. You have to verify that the Word program has not amended the file name to indicate that the version is not the original, but a recovered version. While this won’t affect standalone documents, it can create problems in programs that call out to a document. They will return a ‘file not found’ error as the document they are seeking has been renamed.
In this instance, you can either adjust the settings in the Word repair program to avoid the renaming, or you can use a batch program to strip the amended name from the file name. In later versions of Word, the amended names are enclosed in parenthetical remarks with a number so they are easy to sort out. There are some instances where you won’t be able to reclaim the file because of the extent or type of system damage. This is when you need to use a data recovery specialist. A specialist can manually perform the repair routine and customize each of its steps to your particular set of problems.
Alan Chen is President and Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., the leader in data recovery technologies, trusted by businesses of all sizes worldwide. For more information regarding any of our repair/recovery products, visit DataNumen.