Recovered Work

Microsoft Word (the program) is what I use for  writing. It has a defect (built-in) that gives writers a scare. This is an account of what happened, what I did to recover my work and the status of writing.

26 April 2012 (After Asar, 6 pm)

As I was typing, a MS Word error message appeared suddenly on the screen. It says "Microsoft has stopped working". Then it shuts down - all the open MS Word windows closed. Up comes another query window asking for my next move.  I answered to the effect of 'do an Autorecovery and use a Normal template". Hope was all I had. 

26 April 2012 (After Maghrib, 8.29 pm)

I checked to see if I still had anything recovered. There were 3 MS Word documents in the working file:-

1) Manuscript 2.11MB

2) Copy Manuscript with images 102MB; it stalled at page 410 of 600.

3) Biography of one the early Malay doctors (Dr Mohamed Noor bin Marahakim).

There were 3 documents that needed to be saved from the above Autorecovery process.  So I saved the 3 opened documents and went on with typing as usual. When I saved, it displays "Word is saving Copy Manuscript with images" in the bottom menu bar.

26 April 2012 (After Isya', 11.48 pm)

After some amount of typing, the same thing happened - "Microsoft has stopped working". All the MS Word documents closed and disappeared. The same query window asked what I wanted to do next: "Will automatically save it to normal doc. template. Do you want to save it?" I clicked Yes and saved all the opened documents. It displays "Saving AutoRecovery file Copy Manuscript with images". Other times it says "Word is Saving Copy Manuscript with images".

I continued typing till I had transferred all images into the text-only manuscript. This is a big document and needs a lot of RAM. I had installed sufficient RAM when I bought my laptop. To make things easy, I closed all the other programs and documents and only the big manuscript was on my screen.  

27 April 2012 (After midnight, 1.15 am)

I printed a PDF of the 598 pages (222,609 words) = 42MB (minus front Cover, Content, Index, and back Cover). I checked everything else was in order and then went to sleep at 2.30 am.

27 April 2012 (After breakfast, 10.22 am)

I haven't checked to see what happened to my full manuscript (DOC and PDF).

I will need to check all the sub-titles for all the 43 biographies and also the footnotes (that they all use Times Roman font 10 pt; some are still Trebuchet 10pt). I also need to remove sensitive info. Lastly, I need to re-do the Preface. Then I can submit to Xlibris for copy-editing (proof-reading), etc.